The father of the woman who died in the Wiltshire nerve agent poisonings said he hoped the novichok attack on the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny would lead to fresh scrutiny of Moscow, adding that he believed Germany might work harder to get answers than the UK had done since the death of his daughter. Stan Sturgess, father of Dawn, who died in July 2018, said he felt Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, would ask more searching questions than did Boris Johnson following the novichok poisonings in Salisbury. Johnson was the foreign secretary at the time of the Wiltshire poisonings. He added that the revelations from the German government that it believed Navalny, who is being treated in Berlin, had been poisoned with the deadly nerve agent had brought back awful memories. Sturgess said he was not surprised to learn novichok apparently had been used again. “As soon as I heard Navalny had been poisoned I thought it was novichok. It’s the Russians’ calling card. The Russians want everyone to know it’s them. We always said it could happen again.” Sturgess said: “At least Angela Merkel may ask more questions than Boris Johnson was ever going to ask. Maybe more pressure will be put on the Russians now. Boris never asked anything. We may get some more answers. I don’t know if we’ll get justice but everything opens the door a bit more. “It brings back terrible memories, it churns it all up again. It’s scary times for anyone who goes against the Russians.” Dawn Sturgess’s partner, Charlie Rowley, who is still recovering from the effects of novichok poisoning, said: “They’ve done it once and got away with it and they can do it again and they feel they can get away with it with no come-back.” Rowley suffers from eye problems, shortness of breath and mental health issues, which he blames on his exposure to novichok. Rowley suggested the evidence continued to grow against Russia. “It comes across more and more that it leads back to Russia. Because it’s happened again, you don’t know when it’s going to stop, or if it’s going to stop.” Rowley said he was angry. “I want to find out what happened. I’m upset it’s happened again but I hope we get some results this time. I’d like questions to be answered and I hope this time around whoever is in charge will push forward and try to get some answers. I hope they get to the bottom of it.” The wife of Nick Bailey, the police officer who almost died after investigating the 2018 poisonings, said there had been no justice for the victims of the Salisbury attack including for her husband and Dawn Sturgess’ family. Replying to a tweet from the prime minister in which he condemned the attack on Navalny, Sarah Bailey said: “Actions speak louder than words.” The former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned with novichok in March 2018. Nick Bailey was contaminated after going into Skripal’s house after the attack. The three survived after lengthy spells in hospital. At the end of June 2018, Sturgess and her partner, Rowley, were poisoned by novichok in Amesbury, eight miles north of Salisbury, after he found a fake perfume bottle that turned out to contain the nerve agent. Rowley survived but Sturgess, 44, died on 8 July 2018. The two men suspected of bringing the novichok to Salisbury, Alexander Mishkin and Anatoliy Chepiga, colonels in Russia’s GRU military spy agency, have been charged in absentia over the poisoning of the Skripals, but it is highly unlikely the men will ever be brought before a court in the UK. Both Bailey and his wife replied via Twitter to a post from Johnson in which the prime minister said the attack against Navalny was “outrageous”. “The Russian government must now explain what happened,” he added. Bailey responded: “I have so much that I want to say about this tweet. But I can’t, and I won’t.” Sarah Bailey said: “Justice would be nice. Actions speak louder than words,” before adding that there’s been no justice for the Sturgesses and Skripals in the two and a half years since the attacks, and “now it’s happened again”.