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When Charlie Rowley found a sealed box containing a bottle of perfume on the floor in the Amesbury town, he thought it would make a great gift for his two year old girlfriend, Dawn Sturgess. He gave it to her on June 30, never imagining that the bottle was filled with a toxic nerve agent called Novichok, a Russian-made chemical weapon that the country reserves for some of its most deadly attacks.
Rowley, one of four people in the world known to have survived Novichok's poisoning, spoke in an exclusive interview with British TV channel ITV on Tuesday and described the ordeal. According to Rowley, he found the small box still sealed and then removed the bottle from a cellophane wrap to put a pump dispenser on it. In doing so, he had liquid on his hands
"I washed it and did not think about it," he said. "Everything happened so fast."
Sturgess, his girlfriend, was not so lucky. Rowley said that she sprayed some of the liquid on her wrists and rubbed them together. Within 15 minutes, she told Rowley that she had a headache, and then went to take a bath. Rowley said that he had found her dressed in the bath in a "very sick state". Sturgess dies a little more than a week later, on July 8th.
The incident comes about four months after the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were hospitalized in Salisbury, a town eight miles from Amesbury. Skripal and her daughter were found collapsed and were not answering on a park bench; The investigators believe that Novichok had been smeared on the doorknob of their house. The British government said that Russia was responsible for the attack. Yulia and her father have since been released from the hospital.
British police said that there was no reason to believe that Rowley and Sturgess were directly targeted. But, according to the Guardian, British intelligence services operate under the badumption that Skripal poisoning is still directly related to Rowley and Sturgess poisoning. "The experts at the top secret research center of Porton Down in Wiltshire are trying to establish whether the novichok came from the same batch," writes the Guardian.
Meanwhile, while Rowley is out of the hospital and healing, he says he does not feel lucky to be alive.
"They say I'm lucky but I do not feel lucky," he said. "I lost my partner."
Read more:
The former Russian spy Sergei Skripal left the hospital more than two months after the attack of a nerve agent
How an ex- Russian spy was rescued from one of the deadliest nerve agents ever created
My strength grows daily: & # 39; Yulia Skripal expresses for the first time since poisoning
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