Russian President Vladimir Putin must have ordered the Novichok nerve agent attack on Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in 2018, in an “astonishingly reckless” act that led to the death of an innocent woman, a UK public inquiry concluded on Thursday.

Skripal was found along with his daughter Yulia slumped unconscious on a public bench in the southern English city of Salisbury in March 2018 after Novichok was applied to the front door handle of his nearby home.

About four months later, mother-of-three Dawn Sturgess, 44, died from exposure to the poison after her partner found a counterfeit perfume bottle which Russian spies had used to smuggle the military-grade nerve agent into the country, the inquiry said.

‘OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE OF RUSSIAN STATE INVOLVEMENT’

The Skripals, and a police officer who went to Skripal’s house, were left critically ill from its effects, but recovered.

In his conclusions, the chair, former UK Supreme Court judge Anthony Hughes, said he was certain a team of GRU military intelligence officers had carried out the murder attempt on Skripal, who sold Russian secrets to Britain and moved there after a 2010 spy swap.

“I have concluded that the operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal must have been authorised at the highest level, by President Putin,” Hughes said in his report.

“The evidence that this was a Russian state attack is overwhelming.”

Russia has always denied any involvement, casting the accusations as anti-Russian propaganda. The Russian embassy in London did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Hughes said the “astonishingly reckless” actions meant the would-be assassins, their GRU superiors and those who authorised the attack, up to Putin himself, bore moral responsibility for Sturgess’ death.

Although Putin had previously denounced Skripal as a traitor, the inquiry said there was nothing to suggest the double agent had been imminently at risk.

It found there had been failings in how Skripal was managed as a double agent, but did not conclude the attack could have been prevented without taking the dramatic security measures of hiding him entirely with a new identity and no family contact – something he himself did not want.

Thursday’s report is the second major investigation to blame Putin for attacks on British soil against his perceived enemies.

An inquiry in 2016 concluded that Putin had probably ordered the murder in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident and former agent of the FSB security service, using radioactive polonium-210.