A team of British investigators is in Bulgaria looking into whether the 2015 suspected poisoning of a local arms dealer has links to the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter last year in Salisbury. “There is a British team here on the ground,” Bulgaria’s prime minister, Boyko Borisov, told the Guardian in an interview in Sofia. “They are jointly conducting an investigation with Bulgarian law enforcement authorities.”

Emilian Gebrev, who runs a Bulgarian company that produces and exports weapons, fell into a coma in April 2015, along with his son and one of his company directors. All three survived the suspected poisoning, but the case was never solved.

In October last year, after talking over the Skripal case with a friend, he approached Bulgarian prosecutors with the results of laboratory tests from 2015, which he believed showed he could have been poisoned with a nerve agent similar to novichok, the substance British authorities believe was used against Skripal and his daughter.(theguardian)…[+]