#Pompeo calls suspected poisoning of Alexei Navalny ‘abhorrent attack to justice’

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday night called on Russia to bring to justice “those responsible” for the suspected poisoning of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.

“My G7 counterparts and I strongly condemned the poisoning of Alexei Navalny with a chemical nerve agent,” Pompeo wrote on Twitter.

“This attack contravenes the international norms prohibiting the use of such weapons. We call on Russia to bring those responsible for this abhorrent attack to justice,” he said.

Navalny, 44, has come out of his induced coma in a Berlin hospital, where he has been treated after being flown to Germany on Aug. 22. He became sick two days earlier on a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow.

Aides believe Navalny sipped tea laced with poison at the airport, and his family has always pointed the finger at the Kremlin.

German chemical weapons experts said last week that tests proved “without a doubt” that he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok — though Russia has always denied that the Kremlin was involved in his poisoning.

Earlier Tuesday, Michelle Bachelet, the top UN human rights chief, also called on Moscow to investigate the alleged poisoning.

“It is incumbent on the Russian authorities to fully investigate who was responsible for this crime, a very serious crime that was committed on Russian soil,” Bachelet said in a statement, Agence France-Presse reported.

Novichok is the agent British authorities said was used to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in 2018.

Russia also has rejected any involvement in the Skripal case, as well as in the death of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned with highly radioactive polonium-210 at a hotel in London in 2006.