Nick Bailey, a British police officer poisoned with nerve agent Novichok after responding to the scene where former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned, said on Saturday that he had quit the police force.
Bailey was one of the first responders to Skripal’s home in the English city of Salisbury, after the former spy and his daughter were poisoned on March 4, 2018. The poison had been sprayed on a door handle. Bailey was taken to intensive care after being contaminated with the poison. He returned to duty in 2019.
Bailey said he had dealt with “trauma, violence, upset, injury, and grief” and kept going, but the Salisbury incident took “so much” from him.
“The events in Salisbury in March 2018 took so much from me and although I’ve tried so hard to make it work, I know that I won’t find peace whilst remaining in that environment,” Bailey wrote in his tweet.
He said he felt “honoured” and “grateful” to have been part of Wiltshire Police, and “sorry” for leaving when the “policing family” is “more important now than ever” in the current climate.
“1772: off duty,” the ex-officer wrote at the end of the tweet.
On March 4, 2018, Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, were found unconscious slumped on a bench, vomiting, and fitting in Salisbury, England after reportedly being poisoned with nerve agent Novichok.
They have both survived the attack.
