London: Russian intelligence was spying on former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia for at least five years before they were poisoned in a nerve agent attack, Britain’s National Security Adviser Mark Sedwill said in a letter to NATO on Friday.
Sedwill also said that Russia has tested means of delivering chemical agents “including by application to door handles,” pointing out that the highest concentration of the chemical found after the attack was on Skripal’s front door handle.
“We have information indicating Russian intelligence service interest in the Skripals, dating back at least as far as 2013, when email accounts belonging to Yulia Skripal were targeted by GRU cyber specialists,” Sedwill wrote in the letter, referring to Russia’s foreign military intelligence agency.

Mark Sedwill made the assertion in a letter to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg explaining Britain’s conclusion that the Russian government is to blame for poisoning the Skripals with a military-grade nerve agent on March 4.
He said only Russia has the “technical means, operational experience and the motive” for the attack.
Moscow has strongly denied responsibility and says Britain is waging a defamation campaign against it.
In the letter, Sedwill said the Soviet Union developed fourth generation nerve agents known as Novichoks in the 1980s at the State Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology near Volgograd under the codeword FOLIANT.
“It is highly likely that Novichoks were developed to prevent detection by the West and to circumvent international chemical weapons controls,” he said. “The Russian state has previously produced Novichoks and would still be capable of doing so.”
He said that after the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia signed the Chemical Weapons Convention without reporting its ongoing work on Novichoks. He said it was highly unlikely that any former Soviet republic besides Russia pursued an offensive chemical weapons program.

Russia’s ambassador to Britain said a claim by a British security adviser on Friday that Russia spied on former agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter for at least five years before they were attacked with a nerve agent was a “big surprise.”
“If someone was spying, why were the British services not complaining about that?” Alexander Yakovenko told reporters.
“They always complain if something goes wrong. We didn’t see any signs, any applications from the British side that they are not happy with the way Skripals were living in Salisbury.”