Kremlin critic was ‘poisoned with Novichok’
BERLIN: A critic of Russian President Vladmir Putin now in a coma and being treated in a Berlin hospital was poisoned with a nerve agent of the ‘Novichok’ family, a German government spokesman said on Wednesday.
Toxicology tests of blood samples conducted at a German military laboratory produced “unequivocal evidence” that Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, had been poisoned with Novichok, Steffen Seibert said in a statement.
“The government will inform its partners in the EU and Nato of the results of the investigation,” Seibert said. “It will discuss an appropriate joint response with the partners in the light of the Russian response.”
A Kremlin spokesman said Germany hadn’t informed it that it believed Navalny had been poisoned with Novichok.
Novichok is a group of deadly nerve agents developed by the Soviet military in the 1970s and ’80s. Britain had said Russia used Novichok to poison former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the British city of Salisbury two years ago. Russia has denied any involvement in the attack.
“It is a shocking event that Alexei Navalny has become the victim of an attack with a chemical nerve agent in Russia,” Seibert said. “The federal government condemns this attack in the strongest terms.”
Navalny, a politician and corruption investigator, fell ill on a flight to Moscow from Siberia on August 20 and was taken to a hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk after the plane made an emergency landing. He was transferred two days later to Berlin’s Charité hospital, where doctors last week said initial tests indicated he was poisoned.