Salisbury house where Skripal was poisoned with novichok up for sale

The house in Salisbury where the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok is up for sale.A 30% shared ownership of the house on Christie Miller Road is being offered for £114,000, with the rest being held by Wiltshire council.The local authority bought the house after the poisoning, partly to make sure nobody could trade on its history, for example by creating a macabre tourist attraction.The estate agent Carter & May does not mention Skripal in the details of the three-bedroom house. The listing says it is close to schools, shops and transport links and has a good-sized garden. It says it could make an “ideal family home”.Russian agents daubed Novichok on the door handle of the redbrick detached house on the outskirts of the cathedral city in March 2018. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, who was visiting him, became seriously ill but survived the attack. Four months later, a Wiltshire woman, Dawn Sturgess, fell fatally ill after her partner, Charlie Rowley, found a fake perfume bottle containing Novichok.During an inquiry into the poisonings, Dominic Murphy, a former head of the Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism command, described how hundreds of investigators and scientists painstakingly worked to trace “ground zero”, the spot the Skripals were poisoned.A restaurant, a pub and a car were suspected before the door handle was pinpointed as the source of the poisoning almost two weeks after the Skripals fell ill.The chair of the inquiry, Lord Hughes, concluded Vladimir Putin must have authorised the attack on Skripal and was “morally responsible” for Sturgess’s death. He called the attack a “public demonstration of Russian state power for both international and domestic impact”.Hughes made limited criticism of the way the security services protected Skripal, who was living openly under his own name on Christie Miller Road.The flat in Amesbury, Wiltshire, where Sturgess, 44, fell ill has been demolished.