German government announces Navalny was poisoned with Novichok just like the Skripals and likely by GRU agents. Of course Russians deny this and demanded the Europeans release the test methods they used to figure it out.
Quote:
There is "unequivocal proof" that Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent, Germany has said.
Chancellor Angela Merkel said he was a victim of attempted murder and the world would look to Russia for answers.
Mr Navalny was flown to Berlin after falling ill on a flight in Siberia last month, and remains in a coma.
His team says he was poisoned on President Vladimir Putin's orders. The Kremlin has dismissed the allegation.
The Kremlin spokesman called on Germany for a full exchange of information and foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova complained the Novichok allegations were not backed up by evidence. "Where are the facts, where are the formulas, at least some kind of information?" she asked.
A Novichok nerve agent was used to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the UK in 2018. While they survived, a British woman later died in hospital. The UK accused Russia's military intelligence of carrying out that attack.
|
Quote:
The German government's announcement on Wednesday that Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny has been poisoned by a sophisticated nerve agent known as a Novichok makes this case even more serious than it already was.
Most importantly, it will increase suspicions that, despite its denials, the Russian state was behind his poisoning.
Novichok - meaning "newcomer" in Russian - applies to a group of synthetically produced nerve agents originally developed by the Soviet Union in a laboratory in Uzbekistan before the USSR disintegrated in 1991.
Western intelligence agencies believe that Novichok has since been refined into a hard-to-detect assassination weapon in covert techniques practised by operatives of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, including being smeared on to door handles.
Novichok can be deployed in both liquid and solid forms.
|
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54002880
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54003014