This week, Dominic Grieve, MP for Beaconsfield, writes exclusively to Bucks Free Press readers:

On September 5, the House of Commons heard a statement by the Prime Minister about the painstaking investigation by the police into the crimes of murder, attempted murder and grievous bodily harm, caused by the use of the toxic nerve agent Novichok, which occurred in Salisbury earlier this year.

A far-reaching inquiry began after the attempted poisonings of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in March. About 250 detectives took 1,400 statements from members of the public and examined more than 11,000 hours of CCTV footage.

As a result, the independent Director of Public Prosecutions amassed enough evidence to bring charges against two Russian nationals who are accused of these crimes and of the possession and use of Novichok. The nerve agent found when Dawn Sturgess died and Charlie Rowley became ill, in July, was confirmed by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to be the same as the one deployed in March.

Although the Russian state has consistently denied any culpability, it is important that people should be brought to justice for these crimes.

We are the victims of state terrorism by a state that is run as a gangster organisation. This threatens us all. Russia is behaving wholly outside the norms of the international rules-based system.

We should look carefully at the ease with which Russian nationals on Russian passports can come into and out of this country.

In my lifetime we have seen the fall of the Berlin Wall and the sense of liberation which that gave to people who, previously, literally could not come and go as they pleased. But we risk those freedoms if we allow the system to be abused by the apparatus of a state for the purpose of sending assassins into our country to kill our citizens and those who enjoy our protection.