UK police name two suspects in Novichok nerve agent attack

British police named two Russian nationals on Wednesday as suspects in the March poisonings of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.

The Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service said they have "sufficient evidence" to charge Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov in connection with the attack in the small English city of Salisbury.

Police said the men arrived from Moscow at Gatwick Airport on March 2 and stayed at the City Stay Hotel in Bow Road, East London, before traveling to Salisbury.

Prime Minister Theresa May made a statement to MPs in the House of Commons on Wednesday afternoon, saying, based on a body of intelligence, the two Russians are believed to be officers with the Russian military intelligence service known as the GRU. She said their activity would "almost certainly" have been approved at a senior level and would not have been a "rogue operation".

May said the GRU is "a threat to all our allies and all our citizens".

She told MPs Britain has issued an Interpol red notice and a European arrest warrant for the pair but, with no extradition agreement with Russia, does not anticipate the men being sent to Britain for trial.

The news followed a team of independent experts confirming this week that the substance that killed a woman in Amesbury in July was Novichok, the same nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals.

The intergovernmental Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is based in The Netherlands, could not say whether the two incidents, which happened four months, and eight miles, apart, were attributable to the exact same batch of the chemical.

The British government has blamed Russia for Dawn Sturgess' death and the poisonings of the Skripals and Britain's foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said this week that Russia's actions were "appalling".

Moscowhas consistently denied any involvement.

The BBC reported that Hunt said the poisonings were a reminder of the importance of the global ban on chemical weapons.

Sturgess fell ill on June 30 after handling a "branded" perfume container found by her partner, Charlie Rowley, who also fell ill but who has since recovered. Investigators believe the container had been discarded by the people who poisoned the Skripals. They are working on the theory that the Russian authorities ordered the attack because Sergei Skripal had worked for the British as a double agent during the 1990s and early 2000s. He was subsequently sentenced to 13 years and moved to the UK in 2010, following a prisoner swap.

Russia, meanwhile, has complained that the UK is refusing it access to the Skripals, who retain Russian citizenship. The nation's embassy in the UK said the pair had been "kept in isolation and under full control of British authorities".

The Guardian newspaper says the region around Salisbury and Amesbury is reeling from a financial downturn following the poisonings and noted that Wiltshire council is monitoring the mental health of hundreds of people.