LONDON: British police on Thursday released more video footage of the two suspects they believe poisoned former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury in March.
Two men — known by the aliases Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov — were charged in absentia for the attack in September.
Investigative website Bellingcat has named them as Alexander Yevgenyevich Mishkin and Anatoliy Chepiga, both of whom work for Russia’s GRU intelligence services.
Police realized video footage of two men arriving and moving around Salisbury on Sunday March 4, the day the Skripals were found slumped in the center of the English city.
A man and a woman were poisoned in the nearby town of Amesbury on June 30 after police believe they handled a perfume bottle that contained Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union used in the Skripal poisoning. The woman, Dawn Sturgess, died.
Police said they were appealing for more information from anybody who may have seen the two men in Britain between 2-4 March or had seen the counterfeit ‘Nina Ricci’ perfume box or bottle.
British police release video of Skripal poisoning suspects
British police release video of Skripal poisoning suspects
- Investigative website Bellingcat has named them as Alexander Yevgenyevich Mishkin and Anatoliy Chepiga, both of whom work for Russia’s GRU intelligence services
French publisher recalls dictionary over ‘Jewish settler’ reference
- The entry in French reads: “In October 2023, following the death of more than 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of Hamas attacks”
- The four books are subject to a recall procedure and will be destroyed, Hachette said
PARSI: French publisher Hachette on Friday said it had recalled a dictionary that described the Israeli victims of the October 7, 2023 attacks as “Jewish settlers” and promised to review all its textbooks and educational materials.
The Larousse dictionary for 11- to 15-year-old students contained the same phrase as that discovered by an anti-racism body in three revision books, the company told AFP.
The entry in French reads: “In October 2023, following the death of more than 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of Hamas attacks, Israel decided to tighten its economic blockade and invade a large part of the Gaza Strip, triggering a major humanitarian crisis in the region.”
The worst attack in Israeli history saw militants from the Palestinian Islamist group kill around 1,200 people in settlements close to the Gaza Strip and at a music festival.
“Jewish settlers” is a term used to describe Israelis living on illegally occupied Palestinian land.
The four books, which were immediately withdrawn from sale, are subject to a recall procedure and will be destroyed, Hachette said, promising a “thorough review of its textbooks, educational materials and dictionaries.”
France’s leading publishing group, which came under the control of the ultra-conservative Vincent Bollore at the end of 2023, has begun an internal inquiry “to determine how such an error was made.”
It promised to put in place “a new, strengthened verification process for all its future publications” in these series.
President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday said that it was “intolerable” that the revision books for the French school leavers’ exam, the baccalaureat, “falsify the facts” about the “terrorist and antisemitic attacks by Hamas.”
“Revisionism has no place in the Republic,” he wrote on X.
Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, with 251 people taken hostage, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Authorities in Gaza estimate that more than 70,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces during their bombardment of the territory since, while nearly 80 percent of buildings have been destroyed or damaged, according to UN data.
Israeli forces have killed at least 447 Palestinians in Gaza since a ceasefire took effect in October, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
