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Berlin police have opened an investigation into the suspected poisoning of two Russian journalists visiting the city for a conference last month organised by the Russian Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
The city’s office of criminal investigation confirmed to German media that it had opened the case after reports in the Russian investigative media group Agentsvo were picked up by the Sunday newspaper Welt am Sonntag.
Agentsvo reported that the two women had reported symptoms that pointed to possible poisoning around the time of the event at the end of April.
The women had participated in the event in Berlin at which Khodorkovsky had given a lecture. One woman, who reported feeling unwell before the conference on 29 and 30 April, took herself to the Charité hospital in central Berlin. She has not been named. The other is Natalia Arno, the head of the Free Russia Foundation, a non-profit organisation with its head office in the US.
She referred to her case in public on her Facebook page on 16 May, following Agentsvo’s report, saying she had suffered from “strange symptoms”, stabbing pains and numbness, which had started in Berlin and worsened after she had flown on to Prague for further meetings.
She voiced her suspicion that she may have been poisoned with a nerve agent. In Prague, on returning to her hotel room she had found the door to her hotel room ajar.
Arno said: “I later woke up at 5am suffering sharp pain and strange symptoms.” She flew home to Washington the next day, where she was treated for her symptoms. She also made reference to an investigation by the FBI in Washington, which she said was opened on her return.
In August 2020, the opposition politician and Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was treated in Russia and later in Berlin’s Charité hospital after being poisoned in Siberia with the nerve agent novichok, as western laboratory tests showed. Russia’s secret service is widely believed to be behind the poisoning.
Navalny returned voluntarily to Russia from Germany in January 2021. He was arrested a short time later and has been in prison since then.
Several poison attacks have been carried out abroad and in Russia against Kremlin opponents in recent years. Moscow denies its secret services were responsible.
The nerve agent novichok was also used in an attempted murder in 2018 of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury.
The Skripal case further exacerbated already dire relations between London and Moscow after the 2006 radiation poisoning death in the British capital of the former spy Alexander Litvinenko.
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