Recalling their journey to Heathrow, he says Skripal had changed his mobile phone to ‘an old-fashioned brick’, the suggestion being that he had done so because he felt his calls were being monitored.Īsked about Skripal’s belief that Putin was gunning for him, Mr Cassidy told me: ‘Sergei said that to me. Who knows what he was up to? He must have p***** somebody off.’ Weeks at a time,’ he then says, implying Skripal was still operating as a spy. ‘We never discussed it, but he travelled a lot. ‘Where did you pick him up?’ he asks the female officer sardonically.
#THE SPY NEXT DOOR TV#
When, in the TV drama, the male officer suggests Skripal had ‘retired’ from spying, Mr Cassidy gazes at him in disbelief. Mr Cassidy added that his two Counter Terrorism Command interrogators - a man and a woman - ‘camped’ in his house for six months after the attack, repeatedly going over every tiny detail of Skripal’s movements.
Speaking to me this week, Mr Cassidy said he had agreed to work with the production team only with the proviso that he could vet the script and change anything that wasn’t accurate. Mr Cassidy’s testimony, told to the BBC producers during hours of interviews and revealed here for the first time, offers the strongest evidence yet that the poisoners were sent to Britain on the instructions of Putin himself. For although Britain has always accused the Russian government of being behind the assassination attempt, there have been suggestions that it could have been orchestrated by others, such as renegade enemies of Skripal in the Russian intelligence service. ‘Something Sergei said when he was right here last week. ‘I do, yes,’ replies Mr Cassidy, in the guise of actor Mark Addy - who strongly resembles him, with his burly build and beard. They then ask him whether he recalls any other suspicious events in the days leading up to the poisoning.
In the TV series, in which he closely collaborated, he tells two Counter Terrorism Command officers he is sure they were followed back to Salisbury by a man and woman in a BMW.
Mr Cassidy drove Sergei Skripal (pictured right) to Heathrow Airport to meet his daughter Yulia (left) the day before the pair fell ill on that infamous Sunday afternoon in Salisbury The day before the attack, Mr Cassidy, 63, had driven Skripal to Heathrow Airport to meet Yulia off her flight from Moscow. They spent weeks in hospital yet, miraculously, both survived. On March 4, 2018, posing as tourists fascinated by Salisbury cathedral, two Russian assassins smeared the door handle of Skripal’s house with Novichok, perhaps the most deadly nerve agent ever concocted.Īs we see in the series’s powerful opening scene, within a few hours Skripal, now 68, and his daughter, Yulia, 35, fell into a catatonic stupor as they sat on a public bench after lunching together on that Sunday afternoon. Indeed, in a gripping three-part BBC dramatisation of the Salisbury poisoning atrocity beginning tomorrow (which Mr Cassidy says is realistic down to the smallest detail) he tells British anti-terror officers the ex-spy made the grim prediction again - just one week before the murder attempt.īy now the whole world knows the gist of the story. Salisbury resident Ross Cassidy (pictured) was told by Sergei Skirpal that Vladimir Putin was 'going to get him' one day - the 63-year-old knew he wasn't jokingĬertainly, Mr Cassidy believed Sergei Skripal was serious in predicting he would be assassinated on the orders of the Russian president.įor, as the 63-year-old former Royal Navy submariner told me exclusively this week, he had known his neighbour was a Russian double-agent almost from the moment he mysteriously moved into the cul-de-sac and this was not the first time he had heard the spy next-door utter those portentous words.
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