#Putin critic Alexei Navalny poisoned with nerve agent Novichok: officials

Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok, German officials said Wednesday.

Toxicology tests of blood samples conducted at a German military laboratory showed “proof without a doubt” that the 44-year-old opposition leader was sickened with the Soviet Union-era chemical.

“It is a dismaying event that Alexei Navalny was the victim of an attack with a chemical nerve agent in Russia,” said Steffen Seibert, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman. “The German government condemns this attack in the strongest terms.”

Navalny fell ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow on Aug. 20 after his aides believe he sipped tea at the airport laced with poison.

He was taken to a hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk after the plane made an emergency landing and then transferred two days later to Berlin’s Charité hospital.

Doctors there said last week that initial tests indicated the fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin had been poisoned.

Novichok is the poison used in the 2018 attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skrpial and his daughter in England. The nerve agent is a cholinesterase inhibitor, part of the class of substances that doctors at the Charite initially identified in Navalny.

The Skripals both survived the attack.

The Kremlin, which Navalny’s supporters have accused of carrying out the attack, said it hadn’t been informed yet of the diagnosis.

“Such information hasn’t been relayed to us,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the state Tass news agency.

Russia has denied the accusations as “empty noise.” The country launched a preliminary probe last week.

Navalny remains in a medically induced coma but is in stable condition, Charité said in its latest update.

With Post Wires