Sergei Yulia Skripal
© Global Look PressSergei and Yulia Skripal
According to the Metropolitan Police investigation into the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, the official timeline of their movements on the weekend of the incident is as follows:
Saturday 3rd March
  • 14.40hrs on Saturday 3 March: Yulia arrives at Heathrow Airport on a flight from Russia.
Sunday 4th March
  • 09.15hrs on Sunday, 4 March: Sergei's car is seen in the area of London Road, Churchill Way North and Wilton Road.
  • 13.30hrs: Sergei's car is seen being driven down Devizes Road, towards the town centre.
  • 13:40hrs: Sergei and Yulia arrive in Sainsbury's upper level car park at the Maltings. At some time after this, they go to the Bishops Mill Pub in the town centre.
  • 14.20hrs: They dine at Zizzi Restaurant.
  • 15:35hrs: They leave Zizzi Restaurant.
  • 16.15hrs: Emergency services receive a report from a member of the public and police arrive at the scene within minutes, where they find Sergei and Yulia extremely ill on a park bench near the restaurant.
Whilst fully realising that such a timeline does not necessarily need to include every detail, such as the time that Yulia arrived in Salisbury on the Saturday afternoon, nevertheless, there are some serious problems with this account, which are broadly as follows:
  1. Firstly, it omits crucial information from the morning of 4th March.
  2. Secondly, it ignores a very important incident on the afternoon of 4th March.
  3. Thirdly, it is, I believe, incorrect in the sequence of events it presents.
In this piece, I want to concentrate on the first one of these - the morning - and then cover the second and third in subsequent pieces.

When the timeline above was released by the Metropolitan Police on 17th March, the whereabouts of the Skripals on the morning of 4th March was unknown. At the press conference in which the timeline was released, Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Neil Basu, who is in charge of the investigation, appealed for information about their movements on the morning of 4th March:
"We believe that at around 9.15am on Sunday 4 March, Sergei's car may have been in the areas of London Road, Churchill Way North and Wilton Road. Then at around 1.30pm it was seen being driven down Devizes Road, towards the town centre.

We need to establish Sergei and Yulia's movements during the morning, before they headed to the town centre. Did you see this car, or what you believe was this car, on the day of the incident? We are particularly keen to hear from you if you saw the car before 1.30pm. If you have information, please call the police on 101″ [my emphasis].
Although the Skripals' movements were unknown, it had been thought that they visited the cemetery on London Road, since there were apparently fresh flowers on the grave of Mr Skripals wife, Liudmila. But there was one very important piece of information that was known, which was extremely interesting. According to The Times:
"The Russian spy and his daughter poisoned by nerve agent turned off the GPS tracking on their mobile telephones for four hours on the day they were attacked, it was reported yesterday."
That piece of information alone is enough to make those missing four hours in the morning vital to any investigation. There must have been a reason for the Skripals to make their phones untraceable during that time and - with apologies for stating the blindingly obvious - it was clearly because they did not want their movements at that time to be known. The most plausible explanation for this would seem to be that they had some kind of meeting that morning, a meeting which was important and secret enough for them not to want certain other people knowing where they were and what they were doing.

It is entirely understandable that the Metropolitan Police did not include details of the Skripals' movements on the morning of 4th March in the timeline they released on 17th March, since they did not know them at that time. And given that the Skripals had made their phones untraceable, it is also entirely understandable why the Metropolitan Police desperately wanted people to come forward with information about the four hour time period.

But here's the thing: More than five months later, and this timeline has not been updated. Not only this, but the Metropolitan Police have gone mysteriously quiet about this part of the timeline. Why mysterious? Simply because Sergei and Yulia Skripal have been awake and talking for months, and unless they have steadfastly refused to tell investigators what they were doing on that morning - which is frankly inconceivable - then the Metropolitan Police must know where they were and what they were doing on that morning. And yet they've stopped talking about it and have not updated their timeline since 17th March.

Which raises the following questions:
  1. Where were Sergei and Yulia Skripal on the morning of 4th March?
  2. What were they doing?
  3. Why did they feel the need to turn off the GPS tracking on their phones?
  4. Were they meeting someone, and if so who?
  5. Why has the Metropolitan Police not updated its timeline to include the Skripals' whereabouts that morning, since it must by now be well aware of them?