Two Russians have appeared on state television on Thursday saying they were in Salisbury in March for tourism, not to murder a former Russian spy and his daughter.

Last week, British prosecutors identified two Russians they accused of trying to poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal with a military-grade nerve agent.

Authorities said the Russians were operating under the aliases Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov.

The two men who appeared on Russia’s state-funded RT television station had some physical similarities to the men shown in British police images.

Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov are wanted for conspiracy to murder Sergei Skripal and the attempted murder of Yulia Skripal. Photo: Scotland Yard/Getty Images

“Our friends had been suggesting for a long time that we visit this wonderful town,” one of the men said of the English town of Salisbury in a short clip of the interview played by RT.

“Its famous Salisbury cathedral with a 123-metre spire … the clock … the oldest of its kind that is still working.”

They said they may have approached Mr Skripal’s house by chance but did not know where it was located.

They had stayed less than hour in Salisbury, they said, because of bad weather.

Britain’s Foreign Office said the government is clear that the men in the RT interview are Russian military intelligence officers who used a devastatingly toxic illegal chemical weapon on the streets of Britain.

Britain has said the two suspects were Russian military intelligence officers almost certainly acting on orders from high up in the Russian state. Russia has repeatedly denied any involvement in the case.

“The Petrov/Borishov statements are not credible and don’t match the widely accepted intelligence we have on these individuals,” Mr Glen, who is also a government minister, tweeted.

‘A fantastical coincidence’

Sergei Skripl and daughter Yulia endured a long road to recovery.

Mr Skripal — a former Russian military intelligence colonel who betrayed dozens of agents to Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence service — and his daughter were found slumped unconscious on a bench in the English city of Salisbury in March.

They spent weeks in hospital before being discharged.

The two men said they did not work for Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, were ordinary businessmen, and the victim of what they called “a fantastical coincidence”.

The duo surfaced a day after President Vladimir Putin said Russia had located Petrov and Boshirov, but that there was nothing special or criminal about them.

He expressed hope they would come forward and speak publicly.

The affair returned to the headlines in July when a woman near Salisbury, Dawn Sturgess, died and her partner Charlie Rowley fell ill after Rowley found a counterfeit bottle of Nina Ricci perfume containing the Novichok nerve agent and brought it home.

–ABC