Special FSB unit behind Navalny’s assassination attempt
A group of Russian FSB officers, suspected of poisoning Alexei Navalny, may be involved in three more murders.
These people are members of a classified FSB unit which was tasked with the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. It is a long-running and well-funded group which is engaged in high profile murders.
Christo Grozev, a journalist from the investigative website Bellingcat, said on air of Ekho Moskvy that people suspected of poisoning Alexei Navalny are responsible for three more poisonings and two assassination attempts.
"The group is large, very well financed and has been working for a long time… Three people were actually killed and there were two assassination attempts," Christo Grozev said.
Grozev also said that in two weeks Bellingcat plans to publish a large-scale investigation into Navalny’s poisoning.
According to him, some of the materials of this investigation had already been published, but some information was not made public so that journalists would not be blocked from accessing the sources of information necessary to work on the material.
Alexey Navalny lost consciousness on August 20 on a plane flying from Tomsk to Moscow. After an emergency landing in Omsk, he was hospitalized and two days later taken to the Charite hospital in Berlin for treatment. He was in an induced coma for 19 days. Experts of the Bundeswehr special laboratory at the request of the clinic conducted a toxicological analysis of samples taken from Navalny and found traces of the nerve agent of the Novichok group. Laboratories in Sweden and France, as well as OPCW experts, came to similar conclusions independently.
The Russian authorities deny all accusations of involvement in the assassination attempt on the opposition politician. The EU and the UK imposed sanctions on October 15 for poisoning Navalny. Moscow responded by announcing the introduction of countermeasures against German and French officials. In late November, more than 50 OPCW member states called on Russia to investigate the politician's poisoning.