Ex-medical officer feared for children, novichok inquiry hears

The former chief medical officer for England claimed she had a "strong recollection" of advising the public not to pick up objects they found near the scene of the novichok attack on the Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal, despite there being no record of her making such a statement.

- Steven Morris

Sally Davies told the inquiry into the Salisbury poisonings in Wiltshire that she had a recurrent nightmare that a child would find a discarded container of the nerve agent. But when she was asked why there was no record of her issuing a warning, she conceded she may not have made a public warning after all.

Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, survived the novichok attack in March 2018 but four months later, a Wiltshire woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after being poisoned with novichok contained in a fake perfume bottle apparently left in Salisbury by Russian agents.