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LONDON — A middle-aged British woman, who somehow came into contact with the Soviet-era nerve agent known as Novichok, died Sunday evening at a hospital in south England where she was being treated for exposure to the military-grade chemical weapon. Prime Minister Theresa May said she was “appalled and shocked by the death,” and announced that it is now being investigated as a murder. Dawn Sturgess, 44, was one of five people who became seriously ill after being exposed to the nerve agent in the Salisbury area. ... Sturgess lived in a supported-living facility that helps residents struggling with alcohol...

(Reuters) - British police declared a major incident late on Tuesday after it said a man and a woman in a critical condition may have been exposed to an unknown substance near the southern English town of Salisbury. “Wiltshire Police and partners have this evening declared a major incident after it is suspected that two people might have been exposed to an unknown substance in Amesbury,” the police said in a statement. {snip} Amesbury lies seven miles (11 kms) to the north of Salisbury, where in March Russian former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter ….

The revelation of Porton Down’s CEO shows that someone has been lying about the Skripal case, and that someone is Boris Johnson. The Chief of the Defense Science and Tech lab at Porton Down, the lab examining the chemical agent that the Skripals were poisoned with, came out with the news, in an interview with SkyNews, that they have no idea where the poison originated: “We were able to identify it as Novichok, to identify that it was military-grade nerve agent.” “We have not identified the precise source, but we have provided the scientific info to government who have then...

New light is being shed on the 2001 anthrax attacks in a fascinating open letter to Ayman al Zawahiri of al Qaeda, written by a jihadi living in London. Numan Bin Uthman, a former leader of an armed Islamic group in Libya, provides yet more evidence that the global Islamic jihad movement is losing its resolve.  But the letter contains a startling admission. Uthman tells us of a conversation he had with al Qaeda leaders before the 9/11 attacks in which he urged them not to use WMD. From AKI News: Uthman also said that he had taken part in...

Military personnel exposed to chemical warfare agents should be "reassured".Chemicals such as as sarin were tested on military personnel at Porton Down.Chris Ison/PA Archive/PA Photos The first ever studies of veterans exposed to chemical warfare agents in controversial experiments at the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) Porton Down laboratory has found little evidence that they suffered any long-term health effects, despite a small increase in mortality in the test group.Nearly 500 different chemicals, including nerve agents such as sarin and blistering agents such as sulphur mustard (mustard gas), were tested on military personnel at the Porton Down laboratory near Salisbury...

In December 2001, as the investigation into the U.S. anthrax attacks was gathering steam, coalition soldiers in Afghanistan uncovered what appeared to be an important clue: a trail of documents chronicling an attempt by al-Qaeda to create its own anthrax weapon. The documents told of a singular mission by a scientist named Abdur Rauf, an obscure, middle-aged Pakistani with alleged al-Qaeda sympathies and an advanced degree in microbiology. Using his membership in a prestigious scientific organization to gain access, Rauf traveled through Europe on a quest, officials say, to obtain both anthrax spores and the equipment needed to turn them...

Qaeda Letters Are Said to Show Pre-9/11 Anthrax Plans WASHINGTON, May 20 -Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan began to assemble the equipment necessary to build a rudimentary biological weapons laboratory before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, letters released by the Defense Department show.... The letters are among the documents recovered in late 2001 after the invasion of Afghanistan that United States intelligence officials have frequently cited as evidence that Al Qaeda was working to develop biological weapons.The letters...detail a visit by an unnamed Qaeda scientist to a laboratory at an unspecified location where he was shown "a special confidential room"...

The most famous bioterrorist episode of recent times has been the series of anthrax-laced envelopes mailed from Trenton, New Jersey in September and October 2001 to various newspaper and government offices. In spite of enormous media coverage and painstaking investigation by the FBI, aided by hundreds of thousands of tips from the public and by dozens of teams of scientific researchers, thus far neither the Anthrax Mailer himself (or, against all supposition, herself) nor the source of the anthrax has been identified. In its investigation of the anthrax mailing case, the FBI has relied heavily on specialists. While specialized knowledge...

The man, according to BBC Journalist Andrew Gilligan, to have told him that some parts of the so-called 'dodgy dossier' has gone missing, according to Sky News.

An anthrax outbreak in the U.S., just what the Federation of American Scientists has been waiting for. Having spent a lot of time on the arms-control wars over the past 30 years, I'm well acquainted with the Federation of American Scientists. Its mission is promoting arms control with a scientific twist, nicely illustrated with the huge anthrax outbreak near a suspected Soviet biological weapons facility at Sverdlovsk in 1979. "Because the world scientific-medical fraternity is a close one," a statement by the FAS council said, nations can't expect to conceal secret large weapons accidents or arms-control violations. "We have not...

THE FBI is concentrating its hunt for the source of the anthrax used to terrorise America on laboratories used by the CIA and British government scientists. Only five laboratories, including the defence science and technology laboratories at Porton Down, Salisbury, have been found to have spores of anthrax identical to the bacteria sent through the post to two Democratic senators and news organisations in New York and Florida. But frustrated FBI agents say they have not been able to find enough information about security at Porton Down - one of the most secretive establishments in Britain - to decide whether ...