A senior police officer has apologised for calling Salisbury poisoning victim Dawn Sturgess a “well-known drug addict”.
Ms Sturgess, 44, died on 8 July 2018 after “unwittingly applying” the nerve agent, which was left in a discarded perfume bottle in nearby Amesbury in Wiltshire.
It is believed the bottle was dumped by two members of Russia’s military intelligence squad after they attempted to murder former spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury four months earlier.
Mr Skripal, his daughter Yulia, and then police officer Nick Bailey, who were poisoned, fell ill but survived, as did Ms Sturgess’s boyfriend, Charlie Rowley, who had unknowingly given her the bottle containing the deadly substance.
The Dawn Sturgess inquiry previously heard paramedics who attended to Charlie Rowley decided he was suffering from nerve agent poisoning but Wiltshire Police officers, who knew Mr Rowley as a drug user, disagreed.
Temporary Superintendent Kerry Lawes, who was a detective sergeant at the time of the poisoning, gave evidence in central London on Monday.
Ms Lawes said in an email sent to the coroner a week before Ms Sturgess’s death, that police had received a report of a possible nerve agent poisoning, which she believed was a drugs overdose.
In the note, she said ambulance and fire brigade staff who attended the scene had “panicked somewhat”, adding that Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley were “two well-known drug addicts”.
However, it has since come to light that there is no evidence that Dawn Sturgess was a drug user, and they had been poisoned with a nerve agent.
Ms Lawes, who could not attend the inquiry in person, apologised in a statement read out on her behalf.
“I now know there is no intelligence to support the assertion that Dawn Sturgess was herself a user of illegal drugs or an addict,” the statement said.
“I have stated the ambulance and fire panicked somewhat, this was an unprofessional comment to make and I would like to take the opportunity to apologise for it.”
She said her belief that the incident was drugs related was influenced by the information she had received from the police.
She said she had always acted in good faith and based on what she thought was in the best interests of the individuals involved.
Detective Sergeant Eirin Martin told the inquiry she received a handover from Detective Sergeant Lawes on 2 July, which said they believed the drugs taken by Ms Sturgess and Mr Rowley had been cut with pesticides, causing them to overdose.
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She even asked the force’s media team to send out a press release that day warning of a potential “bad batch” of drugs, she said.
The inquiry, which opened last month, aims to establish the circumstances of Ms Sturgess’s death, who was to blame, and what lessons can be learned.