Are Salisbury Poisoning CCTV Images Actually Surveillance Pictures?

Tom Secker
Sep 6, 2018 · 6 min read
Image 6, purportedly from a CCTV camera on Fisherton Road, Salisbury

In the latest chapter in the Salisbury Novichok saga the police have released a selection of images of two men they are naming as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. While there has been widespread speculation that the images are fake, doctored or otherwise not real pictures, this has involved a lot of embarrassing leaps to conclusions. However, there are some questions that so far I haven’t seen anyone asking.

This picture is labelled as ‘CCTV6 = image of both suspects on Fisherton Road, Salisbury at 13:05hrs on 04 March 2018’. There are a couple of immediate problems :

  1. There’s no camera ID number or timecode or anything indicating this is from a CCTV camera.
  2. There is no Fisherton Road in Salisbury, this picture was taken on Fisherton Street.

So I looked up this spot on Fisherton Street on google streetview, to find the camera that apparently took this picture. This is what I found:

Google streetview of the camera and the location of CCTV image 6 of Petrov and Boshirov

If we zoom in a little we can see that the camera is pointed nowhere near where Petrov and Borishov are in image 6.

Close up of camera that apparently captured image 6

The camera is angled to look over the bridge, not down the pavement on that side of the road:

Rough mock-up showing the camera’s angle in street view vs the angle needed to capture image 6

To capture image 6 the camera would have to be pointed down at the pavement on that side of the road.

Rough mock up showing camera angle necessary to capture image 6

The camera appears to have motors, enabling it to be moved remotely, but given the angle of image 6 we can only assume this is not the camera’s default angle. It only shows a small portion of the area it can cover.

Image 6

So if image 6 was captured by this camera then someone would have had to be moving it remotely, using it as a surveillance camera. But that person would need to know that these two men were of interest, in order to be tracking them in this way.

Which brings us to the mystery of image 7.

Image 7, purportedly from Fisherton Road, Salisbury

This image is labelled ‘CCTV7 = image of both suspects (rear) on Fisherton Road, Salisbury at 13:08hrs on 04 March 2018’. There are three immediate problems with this picture:

  1. There is no Fisherton Road in Salisbury, this is Fisherton Street.
  2. There is no camera ID number or timecode indicating this is CCTV.
  3. We cannot see Petrov and Boshirov’s faces, putting the lie to the police’s claim that a highly skilled Super Recogniser Squad were necessary to identify the suspects.

Two detectives from Scotland Yard’s unique super recognisers squad are spearheading the search for suspects in the Salisbury poisoning case, Sky News can reveal.

The officers, who have a rare skill in memorising faces, are thought to have played a vital role in identifying two Russian suspects the UK authorities want to extradite from Russia.

In reality, the two men were readily identifiable from their clothing, which changed very little through the trip. Though Petrov does appear to have switched jackets, this didn’t make identification any more difficult because he flipped from one with a blue body and darker blue sleeves to one that was all the same tone of blue:

Petrov with lighter blue jacket with darker sleeves (possibly a body warmer)
Petrov in a different entirely blue jacket

Indeed, the fact that the men didn’t change their attire very much is suggestive of very poor tradecraft. As is the claim that they carried out surveillance on Sergei Skripal’s house the day before they launched the attack. Normally, in a covert operation, separate teams are responsible for surveillance and for carrying out the physical operation, to reduce the chance of being recognised or caught. So if this was a Russian state-sponsored attack then it was done very, very badly.

Back to image 7, streetview offers an even more obvious problem — the CCTV camera at that intersection (of Fisherton Street and Summerlock Approach) is pointing in completely the wrong direction:

Note the CCTV camera in the top right
CCTV camera with eyes in the back of its… head?
Image 7, which clearly wasn’t captured by either of the two cameras visible in streetview

Unlike the camera that apparently captured image 6, this camera is pointing in completely the wrong direction and doesn’t appear to have any motors enabling it to be moved remotely. There is another camera on the other end of the block, but it too is pointed at an angle that couldn’t capture image 7, and doesn’t appear to have motors.

So we have two images, clearly of these two men, clearly at specific geographical locations in Salisbury. But there is no date, no timestamp and nothing else to indicate they are from CCTV cameras. This leaves open several possibilities:

  1. Additional cameras were installed, or the cameras and/or their angles were moved in between when those streetview pictures were taken and when Petrov and Boshirov visited Salisbury.
  2. Image 6 was captured by the camera we can see in streetview, but the camera was being moved remotely in order to spy on them, meaning someone already knew they were persons of interest before the Skripals got poisoned.
  3. The images were captured by surveillance cameras, though it is difficult to see where any such cameras would be placed in order to capture images 6 and 7.
  4. This is all complete horseshit and the images were fabricated, badly.

While the fourth option might seem speculative, consider that the police still have these images up on their site labelled with the wrong address — Fisherton Road instead of Fisherton Street. The announcement of Boshirov and Petrov as the suspects has been bungled, having initially been quasi-announced back in July but no one bothered to tell the security minister. It was then re-announced so that Theresa May would have something to distract from her government’s failings when Parliament re-opened. Complete with incorrectly labelled images and no explanation of their source.

I doubt that the police simply created these images on photoshop, but in any case the pictures do little to implicate the two men in the Skripal family poisoning. All they really establish is that those two men were in Salisbury around the time of the poisoning. Indeed, after several months of investigation by a crack unit of specialist facial-recognisers, I would have thought the police would have come up with more than a handful of CCTV pictures.

A final thought: the reason the police released still images and not video is because someone was controlling the cameras to follow these two men, whoever they are and whatever they were doing. Video would make this clear, as the cameras would move to follow the men. If the police do eventually release video from static cameras capturing these images then I will concede that this line of questioning is moot.

Tom Secker

Written by

Journalist, Investigative historian, podcaster and author patreon.com/tomsecker

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