The investigation is being conducted by the State Security Unit, a special team investigating “terrorism”-related cases.
German police say they are investigating the possible poisoning of two Russian exiles who attended a conference in Berlin last month organized by Russian Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Berlin police told Portal on Sunday that “a file had been opened” after the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, citing Russian investigative media group Agentstvo, reported that two women had reported symptoms suggesting possible poisoning .
The investigations are being conducted by state security, a special team investigating cases related to “terrorism” or politically motivated crimes, a spokesman for the Berlin police told the AFP news agency.
“An investigation has been launched. “The investigation is ongoing,” he said, declining to give further details.
Russian investigative media outlet Agentstvo published a report last week that two participants who attended a meeting of Russian dissidents in Berlin on April 29 and 30 had health problems.
One participant, who was a journalist who had recently left Russia, experienced unspecified symptoms during the event. They said the symptoms may have started earlier.
The report added that the journalist visited the Charité university hospital in Berlin – where Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was being treated after being poisoned in August 2020.
The second participant mentioned was Natalia Arno, head of the NGO Free Russia Foundation in the United States, where she has lived for ten years since fleeing Russia.
Arno had attended the dissidents’ meeting in Berlin before her trip to Prague, where she experienced symptoms and found her hotel room had been opened, Agentstvo reported.
When she traveled to the United States the next day, she contacted a local hospital and the authorities.
Arno described her struggles – “stabbing pains” and “numbness” – on Facebook this week and said the first “strange symptoms” had already appeared before she arrived in Prague. She said she still has symptoms but is feeling better.
“Inconclusive Tests”
The Agentstvo report also said that former US ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, now executive director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, suffered from symptoms of poisoning a few months before Russia invaded Ukraine.
The think tank Atlantic Council confirmed that in April 2021 Herbst was showing symptoms that could resemble those of poisoning, but medical tests were inconclusive.
It added that it worked with US federal investigators, who took a blood sample but found no toxic compounds in the lab results.
Autumn has now fully recovered, it said.
In recent years, there have been several poisoning attacks against Kremlin opponents abroad and in Russia.
Moscow denies that its secret services are responsible.
But European laboratories confirmed that Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent manufactured in the Soviet Union.
The nerve agent was also used in a 2018 assassination attempt on former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury.
The Skripal case exacerbated already strained relations between London and Moscow since the death of former spy Alexander Litvinenko from radiation poisoning in 2006.