BERLIN (Reuters) – German police said they were investigating the possible poisoning of two Russian exiles who attended a conference in Berlin at the end of April organized by Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Berlin police told Reuters a “dossier was opened” after Germany’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper, citing Russian investigative media group Agnetstvo, reported that two women had reported symptoms of possible poisoning.
The police did not provide further details, citing the ongoing investigation.
Media reports stated that one of the women was a journalist and her symptoms may have already appeared before the conference on April 29 and 30. I went to the Charité hospital in Berlin.
The second woman is Natalia Arnault, director of the NGO Free Russia Foundation. She wrote on her Facebook page that she found her hotel room door had been left open.
She also wrote, “I woke up at 5 am with severe pains and strange symptoms.”
Several poison attacks have been carried out abroad and in Russia against opponents of the Kremlin in recent years. Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was treated in Russia and later in Germany for what Western laboratory tests showed was an attempt to poison him with a nerve agent in Siberia in 2020.
The government in Moscow denied the accusations.
Navalny voluntarily returned to Russia in 2021 from Germany. He was arrested in January of that year and has been in jail ever since.
(Covering by Maria Martinez; Editing) By Alexandra Hudson
Our standards: Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.