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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

A retired Russian military intelligence officer has fallen ill in England after exposure to an unknown substance [nytimes.com]. Does that sound familiar [wikipedia.org]?

A man identified by local news reports as a retired Russian military intelligence officer who once spied for Britain is critically ill at a British hospital, and the authorities were investigating his "exposure to an unknown substance."

According to several reports, the man, found unconscious on a bench in the city of Salisbury, is Sergei V. Skripal, 66. He was once jailed by Moscow, then settled in Britain after an exchange [nytimes.com] of spies between the United States and Russia in 2010.

The British police have not publicly identified the man in the hospital or a 33-year-old woman who fell sick with him at a shopping mall called the Maltings.

The authorities have, however, released enough detail about what they called a "major incident" to draw some comparisons, however premature, to the case of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who was poisoned in London in 2006.

Also at BBC [bbc.com] and Reuters [reuters.com].

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