The Skripal incident: have Britain’s finest cocked up… again?

On Friday 9th March, 5 days after the supposed poisoning of the Skripals, the Mirror published a story in which it boasted it had discovered new CCTV footage “showing what is believed to be a former Russian spy and his daughter minutes before they were found poisoned on a bench”. The scene is a walkway – or an alley – that is adjacent to the Zizzi restaurant and leads to the park where the Skripals apparently tried to find relief from the onset of their poisoning.

“Timings on the video match with eyewitness accounts given to police” reports the Mirror, although the film that the author has seen has had the time stamps cropped off in the most cunning fashion, and in our book, dear reader, this always indicates an effort to disguise the fact that there is something wrong with the footage.

There is something wrong with the footage.

The Mirror describes it as follows:

The stocky, grey-haired man believed to be Mr Skripal is wearing a dark jacket and does not appear to be in any distress.

He walks past the camera with the two women at 4.08pm. The brunette woman believed to be Ms Skripal is wearing a white jacket and holding a pink handbag.

The second woman appears to be blonde and is alongside Mr Skripal walking a small dog.

At 4.15pm, a police car speeds down the pedestrian alleyway after receiving a 999 call.

The reader wasn’t warned about the third individual with the dog (!) because it makes for a very pleasant surprise, does it not? According to the Mirror (and other titles), a third party (with animal) had joined Sergei and Yulia to walk the route to that infamous park bench, the scene of their physical breakdowns:

The former double agent, 66, appears to be alongside a mystery woman while his daughter Yulia, 33, is strolling a few feet ahead of them.”

Unfortunately, this Mirror story is a crock of horse manure. The footage doesn’t show a party of three. It shows three individuals going about their own separate business. We can tell this because a) people who are together don’t travel like the individuals do on the footage – here referring particularly to the girl who leads the way; and b) the figure at the back of the group – presumably a woman, because she is carrying a handbag (although if there is a dog, it’s hard to see it), overtakes the second character. This is observable in stills collected from the footage:

Moreover, these people couldn’t be a Skripal party because…

Freya Church, 27, who works at Snap Fitness gym opposite The Maltings, said she left work  at 4pm on Sunday and saw Mr Skripal and a younger woman on the bench just a few yards away.

(This is from a Telegraph article that will be referred to often). If the reader would care to look at a map, the gym is closer to the park than the restaurant. Freya Church would have got to the bench before the party in the Mirror footage.

When we discover the corporate-media making claims about the content of video to suit a certain narrative, and on closer scrutiny, find that that content doesn’t appear to show what is claimed, then it’s a sure sign of mischief. It suggests that there isn’t actually any material to support the narrative. And this raises a huge doubt about the substance of the incident.

When it is propelling a Government agenda, corporate-media needs to peddle material to bring the public perception along with the idea; i.e. to manufacture consent. The agenda behind the Skripal case is creating leverage against Russia – which is not guaranteed to be popular, because Russia has a nuclear capability that many Britons believe should be respected by the hubris filled British Government. When corporate-media needs to engineer support for Government action, this is done by emotional manipulation through the material presented as news. Corporate-media wouldn’t bother forging the fabric of reality for incidents that aren’t linked to a Government agenda.

So, it appears that corporate-media has invented material (or misreported its context) for emotional manipulation for an agenda. And it is quite possible that it had to do this because material that had been prepared for the purpose was unexpectedly made redundant. The explanation follows.

Here is an extract from a Mirror article published on 6th March – that’s the second day after the incident occurred.

CCTV footage shows a man and woman ‘of interest’ walking through an alleyway minutes before a former Russian double agent and his daughter were found critically ill on a bench nearby.

Ex-spy Sergei Skripal, 66, and 33-year-old Yulia Skripal were discovered slumped on the bench near a shopping centre in Salisbury, Wiltshire, on Sunday afternoon, according to the BBC.

Now, detectives probing the pair’s suspected poisoning have obtained an image capturing a couple walking together about half an hour before police were alerted.

It shows a man and woman walking through an alleyway connecting a Zizzi restaurant and the bench where Skripal and his daughter were found just after 4pm two days ago…

Police took away an image, shot at 3.47pm, from a camera at Snap Fitness 24/7, according to the gym’s manager.

The headline of this article poses the question “Does this CCTV show final steps of Russian spy and daughter before they collapsed after ‘being poisoned’?”

The image being referred is below. Notice the red hand bag, and how very big and obvious it is.

On the same day that the Mirror article was published, at midday and about three hours later, the Telegraph announced that it had the first pictures of Yulia Skripal – it was revealing them for the first time. The article (the link is provided above) which served as a vehicle for this also contained the following:

Sergei Skripal, 66, was found unconscious in Salisbury, Wiltshire, along with his daughter, 33, on Sunday at 4pm.

The two were seen minutes earlier walking through an alley that connects Zizzi restaurant, which is currently closed “as a precaution” pending police investigations, and the bench where they were found unconscious.

Here, then, is the answer to the Mirror’s earlier question. The two people in the image which police took from Snap Fitness 24/7 were Sergei and Yulia Skripal. But there was a problem. The image that the Telegraph had scooped to present in its internet pages as the very first showing the identity of Yulia Skripal was not of a blonde.

The next day, this blunder was being managed†, and the author has found two examples which were, quite tellingly, published within 20 minutes of each other. The Standard, at 8.30am, produced this:

A hunt is under way for a woman with blonde hair seen on CCTV shortly before former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter were found collapsed after a suspected assassination attempt.

The footage showed the young woman, carrying a red handbag, walking beside an older man not far from the bench where the pair were discovered in Salisbury on Sunday afternoon.

It was initially thought the CCTV images were of former double agent Mr Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, shortly before they fell ill after being exposed to an unknown substance.

But a witness who had seen the pair before they collapsed has now reportedly claimed that Yulia is not blonde, but had red hair when she was seen in the city with her father.”

The Mirror this:

Police are urgently trying to trace a blonde woman carrying a red handbag seen on CCTV shortly before a Russian double agent was found poisoned.

Footage emerged yesterday showing a man and woman ‘of interest’ walking through an alleyway 20 minutes before Sergei Skripal and daughter Yulia were found in a critical condition…

It was initially thought the pair may be Skripal and his daughter – but pictures of Yulia show she had reddish-brown hair, while the woman on camera is blonde.

In the author’s opinion, the Mirror was making reference to the “pictures of Yulia” that were premiered by the Telegraph. On the other hand, the Standard attempted to obfuscate the source of the problem; but the last paragraph in the extract is extraordinarily silly: News just in. An unnamed witness who saw Yulia in the city before she collapsed made a point of letting everyone know that at that point Yulia wasn’t blonde. It doesn’t ring true.

Of course, there was a witness who did see Yulia after she had collapsed, and this was Freya Church as featured in the Telegraph article mentioned at various points on this page. This is what Ms Church had to report:

I was particularly worried about her… She was slumped over on the man’s shoulder. To be honest, I thought they might be homeless but they were perhaps better dressed. I just thought this is weird, especially as she was clearly quite a bit younger than him.

She had a red bag at her feet. He was gesturing at the sky, doing some kind of movements with his hands. He was looking up and his eyes were glazed. There was no one else there near them at this point. No one was helping them.

As it turns out, Yulia Skripal had a red bag.

What should we make of this?

What the author is able to comprehend most easily is that the spinners of media content to support the Skripal incident narrative managed to solve the problem of a spare woman – who suddenly threatened to be a snag in what should have been a smooth laying-down and arranging of the public consciousness. The problem was fixed with the newer CCTV footage that purported to show the Skripals in a party of three. Very clever, but also incredibly damning when one can see the dejavu in the Matrix, and can apprehend the conjurers of reality as they work – which is what we have done here.

Undoubtedly, in the world of the Muggles, this spare woman will now be overlooked and forgotten. Indeed, the thinking processes of the modern Briton are such that the red bag was surely a visual prompt for connecting what might otherwise have been disparate information (notice how the two figures look at the camera). Could it be that the image taken from the surveillance cameras at the Snap Fitness 24/7 gym was not only meant to represent Sergei and Yulia in corporate-media coverage, but was a picture of the two people who were discovered on the bench? If so, where is Yulia Skripal?

As a matter of fact, Yulia’s friends back in Russia are very concerned about her – and indeed, they are wondering if she is even alive. Naturally, they think that she has been in a coma. (We all think that she is in a coma, although it appears that no one in the public sphere knows exactly where this coma is taking place).

Yulia Ni, who is listed as one of the poisoned 33-year-old’s five best friends on the popular Russian social networking site VK, said: “I need some undeniable proof that she is actually alive, because we have suspicions that the truth about Yulia’s and her father’s conditions are being held from us.”

She said that friends back in Russia were desperate for further details about Ms Skripal’s condition, and found the scarce information offered by the British government suspicious.

Ms Ni told The Telegraph: “It appears to be very strange that there is not more concrete information available. The week has passed since they went into a comatose state.

“Can they breathe on their own or are they on a respirator? Do they react to light or have any other basic reflexes? The authorities should have already released some information to the public!” A childhood friend of Ms Skripal, Irina Petrova, told The Telegraph she was suspicious of the police investigation into her friend’s poisoning.

Observe, bovine British, the questioning mind of the 21st century Russian. This is what a human being is supposed to do. Obviously, the comment is not directed at FBEL readers, who are now invited to have a good think, and consider the coverage offered in the previous FBEL article on this topic where it was noticed that a doctor on the scene of the incident did not suffer any ill effects, while a policeman appeared to have suffered a poisoning injury at another time and place. Consider also the account in the same piece of Sergei Skripal’s impatience in the Zizzi restaurant – almost as if he had an appointment to keep.

The reader will be wondering, is FBEL calling a hoax? We’re not going to stick our neck out that far at this stage, surely? More information is required, and evidently it might be on the way as police are apparently now looking at “high quality CCTV footage of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the moments before they collapsed”. Of course, CCTV can be produced after the fact, and even when it is flawed, it won’t make any difference to a gullible public and a corrupt justice system (most of the material used in the Woolwich incident all had the wrong time-stamps on it). So, what value the late coming images to shore up a narrative?

What we’d like to see is the Russian Embassy in London gaining access to Yulia Skripal so that some news can be conveyed to her friends in Russia, and indeed to the wider world. No one should forget to what extent the British Government is indeed a shower of shysters. The Russian Government (adhering to the relevant treaty) has said that it wants a sample of the substance that Theresa May asserted was the weapon in an unlawful act of aggression. It should ask for proof of the crime.

† Newcomers will undoubtedly find such assertions odd. Old hands at this site know that on such occasions as this, there is coordination between what appears to be very different wings of the corporate-media – and that the direction must come from the same place. This is knowledge acquired through years of observation.