Eight people have been arrested on Merseyside by police investigating the discovery of alleged drugs laboratories “on an industrial scale”.

Officers from the North West Regional Organised Crime Unit (NWROCU) executed 10 arrest warrants in dawn raids on Wednesday at residential properties across the region.

Suspects were held on suspicion of the production of, and conspiracy to supply, class A and B drugs, as part of what is believed to be one of the biggest operations of its kind ever seen in the UK.

At one address in Prescot, police used a saw to cut through the front door before arresting a 68-year-old man, who was escorted to a police van wearing shorts and with a jacket over his head, covering his face.

The NWROCU began investigating two and a half years ago when police in South Wales detained a Liverpool-based suspect with an estimated £1m worth of amphetamines.

Warrants were carried out in April 2024 at industrial sites in Bootle and Huyton, with officers finding a tonne of suspected heroin adulterant at one and 550kg of what was believed to be cocaine adulterant at the other, Inspector Danny Murphy of Merseyside Police said.

Detectives also found 80kg of amphetamine in a simultaneous raid on a suspected laboratory at a residential premises in St Helens.

Inspector Murphy said: “We think the laboratory set-ups and the industrial scale of it at the time, in 2023, was the biggest we’ve seen in the UK, so it’s a big investigation, a very detailed one.”

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Mr Murphy said the organised crime group was suspected of transporting the drugs across the country in a multimillion-pound conspiracy.

Those arrested are alleged to have been “significant players” and to have carried out a number of roles within the suspected criminal enterprise, including “cooking” the drugs and couriering across the country, as well as organising.

Mr Murphy said they believed drugs were imported to the country before being bulked out with adulterants in the labs, potentially making millions of pounds of profit for the gang.

The assassination attempt on a former Russian spy was authorised by Vladimir Putin, who is “morally responsible” for the death of a woman poisoned by the nerve agent used in the attack, a public inquiry has found.

The chairman, Lord Hughes, found there were “failings” in the management of Sergei Skripal, 74, who was a member of Russian military intelligence, the GRU, before coming to the UK in 2010 on a prisoner exchange after being convicted of spying for Britain.

But he found the assessment that he wasn’t at “significant risk” of assassination was not “unreasonable” at the time of the attack in Salisbury on 4 March 2018, which could only have been avoided by hiding him with a completely new identity.

Mr Skripal and his daughter Yulia, 41, who was also poisoned, were left seriously ill, along with then police officer Nick Bailey, who was sent to search their home, but they all survived.

Dawn Sturgess, 44, died on 8 July, just over a week after unwittingly spraying herself with novichok given to her by her partner, Charlie Rowley, 52, in a perfume bottle in nearby Amesbury on 30 June 2018. Mr Rowley was left seriously ill but survived.

In his 174-page report, following last year’s seven-week inquiry, costing more than £8m, former Supreme Court judge Lord Hughes said she received “entirely appropriate” medical care but her condition was “unsurvivable” from a very early stage.

The inquiry found GRU officers using the aliases Alexander Petrov, 46, and Ruslan Boshirov, 47, had brought the Nina Ricci bottle containing the novichok to Salisbury after arriving in London from Moscow with a third agent known as Sergey Fedotov to kill Mr Skripal on 2 March.

The report said it was likely the same bottle Petrov and Boshirov used to apply the military-grade nerve agent to the handle of Mr Skripal’s front door before it was “recklessly discarded”.

“They can have had no regard to the hazard thus created, of the death of, or serious injury to, an uncountable number of innocent people,” it said.

It is “impossible to say” where Mr Rowley found the bottle, but was likely within a few days of it being abandoned on 4 March, meaning there is “clear causative link” with the death of mother-of-three Ms Sturgess.

Lord Hughes said he was sure the three GRU agents “were acting on instructions”, adding: “I have concluded that the operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal must have been authorised at the highest level, by President Putin.

“I therefore conclude that those involved in the assassination attempt (not only Petrov, Boshirov and Fedotov, but also those who sent them, and anyone else giving authorisation or knowing assistance in Russia or elsewhere) were morally responsible for Dawn Sturgess’s death,” he said.

Russian ambassador summonsed

After the publication of the report, the government announced the GRU has been sanctioned in its entirety, and the Russian Ambassador has been summonsed to the Foreign Office to answer for Russia’s ongoing campaign of alleged hostile activity against the UK.

Sir Keir Starmer said the findings “are a grave reminder of the Kremlin’s disregard for innocent lives” and that Ms Sturgess’s “needless” death was a tragedy that “will forever be a reminder of Russia’s reckless aggression”.

“The UK will always stand up to Putin’s brutal regime and call out his murderous machine for what it is,” the prime minister said.

He said deploying the “highly toxic nerve agent in a busy city centre was an astonishingly reckless act” with an “entirely foreseeable” risk that others beyond the intended target would be killed or injured.

The inquiry heard a total of 87 people presented at A&E.

Lord Hughes said there was a decision taken not to issue advice to the public not to pick anything up which they hadn’t dropped, which was a “reasonable conclusion” at the time, so as not to cause “widespread panic”.

He also said there had been no need for training beyond specialist medics before the “completely unexpected use of a nerve agent in an English city”.

After the initial attack, wider training was “appropriate” and was given but should have been more widely circulated.

In a statement following the publication of his report, Lord Hughes said Ms Sturgess’s death was “needless and arbitrary”, while the circumstances are “clear but quite extraordinary”.

“She was the entirely innocent victim of the cruel and cynical acts of others,” he said.

‘We can have Dawn back now’

Speaking after the report was published, Ms Sturgess’s father, Stanley Sturgess, said: “We can have Dawn back now. She’s been public for seven years. We can finally put her to peace.”

In a statement, her family said they felt “vindicated” by the report, which recognised how Wiltshire police wrongly characterised Ms Sturgess as a drug user.

But they said: “Today’s report has left us with some answers, but also a number of unanswered questions.

“We have always wanted to ensure that what happened to Dawn will not happen to others; that lessons should be learned and that meaningful changes should be made.

“The report contains no recommendations. That is a matter of real concern. There should, there must, be reflection and real change.”

Wiltshire Police Chief Constable Catherine Roper admitted the pain of Ms Sturgess’s family was “compounded by mistakes made” by the force, adding: “For this, I am truly sorry.”

Russia has denied involvement

The Russian Embassy has firmly denied any connection between Russia and the attack on the Skripals.

But the chairman dismissed Russia’s explanation that the Salisbury and Amesbury poisonings were the result of a scheme devised by the UK authorities to blame Russia, and the claims of Petrov and Borisov in a television interview that they were sightseeing.

The inquiry chairman said the evidence of a Russian state attack was “overwhelming” and was designed not only as a revenge attack against Mr Skripal, but amounted to a “public statement” that Russia “will act decisively in its own interests”.

Lord Hughes found “some features of the management” of Mr Skripal “could and should have been improved”, including insufficient regular written risk assessments.

But although there was “inevitably” some risk of harm at Russia’s hands, the analysis that it was not likely was “reasonable”, he said.

“There is no sufficient basis for concluding that there ought to have been assessed to be an enhanced risk to him of lethal attack on British soil, such as to call for security measures,” such as living under a new identity or at a secret address, the chairman said.

He added that CCTV cameras, alarms or hidden bugs inside Mr Skripal’s house might have been possible but wouldn’t have prevented the “professionally mounted attack with a nerve agent”.

Sky News has approached the Russian Embassy for comment on the report.

A 3.3-magnitude earthquake has struck Lancashire – with dozens of people saying it shook their homes or woke them up.

The British Geological Survey (BGS) said it was “felt across the South Lakes and Lancashire, mainly within 20km of the epicentre”, including Kendal and Ulverston in neighbouring Cumbria.

Preliminary data suggests it struck off the coast of Silverdale at 11.23pm, at a depth of 1.86 miles (3km).

Each year, between 200 and 300 earthquakes are detected and located in the UK by the BGS.

Between 20 and 30 earthquakes are felt by people each year, and a few hundred smaller ones are only recorded by sensitive instruments.

Most of these are very small and cause no damage.

People posted their reaction online. Reports included that the earthquake “felt like an explosion and vibration coming from underground”.

Sue Anderson wrote on a Carnforth social media page: “Absolutely shaken to my core. Don’t think I’ll be sleeping tonight, terrified.”

Lynn Snowdon wrote on the local Facebook page for Carnforth, Lancashire: “What the hell was that? House just shaken like a leaf?”

Dozens of locals posted similar experiences, including links to details of the tremor on the Volcano Discovery website.

One resident in the village of Over Kellet, Lancashire, said: “It felt like my whole house moved side to side and everything inside just shook, and it was one big thud, then the after-shakes seemed to last a bit longer than the first shake and slowly fizzled out. Very scary.”

A resident in the nearby village of Silverdale added: “Loud rumble and rattling of fixtures in house, as though something had collapsed or the chimney had fallen off. Significant enough to go outside to check.”

A resident of Carnforth said: “Was a very strange feeling for this area. Shaking and rumbling, along with a bang. Thought a train had derailed or something, as I live near the tracks.”

Another comment said it “sounded like bricks falling/the roof falling in”, while another wrote that it was “so powerful to shake the whole house”.

Dozens of messages on X reported the earthquake in the surrounding area.

“Whole place shook twice, here in a lakeside holiday rental in Carnforth,” wrote one.

Another person from Carnforth, near the epicentre, said: “I’m used to my door slamming as it is hard to shut, but only registered it was an earthquake after someone had told me.”

While the accounts are unverified, some people also commented they had felt shaking as far away as the Fylde Peninsula, specifically Poulton-le-Fylde and Fleetwood, both north of Blackpool.

According to the BGS, the most recent earthquake to measure over 3.3 was recorded on 20 October near Loch Lyon in Perth and Kinross. The 3.7-magnitude quake was one of a series of tremors registered over a number of days.

Meanwhile, Lancashire has suffered a series of tremors in the past as a result of fracking, including a 2.1-magnitude tremor at Cuadrilla’s site near Blackpool in 2019, prompting a fracking ban in England.

But not all tremors are naturally occurring, including Liverpool fans’ reaction to a goal in the Premier League and celebrations from Scotland fans, which the BGS said its instruments were able to register.