German police announced that they are investigating the possible poisoning of two Russian women living in exile, who attended a conference in Berlin organized by opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky at the end of April.
Berlin police told Reuters that "an investigation has been opened" after the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported, citing the investigative journalism site Agentura.ru, that the women reported symptoms indicative of possible poisoning.
Media reports indicated that one of the women is a journalist, and her symptoms possibly appeared even before the conference, which took place on April 29 and 30. The other woman, named Natalia Arno, runs the Free Russia Foundation, a non-governmental organization. She wrote on her Facebook page that she discovered her hotel room door was left ajar, adding, "I woke up at five in the morning with severe pain and strange symptoms."
In recent years, Kremlin opponents have faced attacks with toxic substances both inside and outside Russia. Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny received treatment in Russia and then in Germany for what Western laboratory analyses revealed to be an attempt to poison him with a nerve agent in Siberia in 2020.
The government in Moscow denies the allegations. Navalny voluntarily returned from Germany to Russia in 2021, where he was arrested in January of that year and has been imprisoned ever since.
