The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed Thursday (September 17th) that it had dispatched experts to Germany to take samples from Russian opponent Alexei Navalny and indicated that the results of tests to determine if he had been poisoned in Novichok would soon be known.
Read also: The Navalny affair rocks the Franco-Russian rapprochement
Berlin, where the number one opponent in the Kremlin is hospitalized, victim of an attempted poisoning on August 20 in Siberia, according to his entourage, officially requested "
technical assistance
" from the international institution based in The Hague, the OPCW said.
A German military laboratory concluded on September 3 that Alexey Navalny, 44, had been poisoned by a Novichok-type substance, designed for military purposes in Soviet times, which Moscow disputes.
French and Swedish laboratories confirmed the German conclusions, leading Paris and Berlin to insist again on Monday on the need for a Russian investigation.
The GRU, the main suspect for London
Berlin, however, said it was awaiting the OPCW's assessment.
“
A team of experts from the technical secretariat independently took biomedical samples from Mr. Navalny to be analyzed in the OPCW's reference laboratories
,” the institution said.
"
The results of these analyzes will be known shortly and will be shared with the German authorities
," she added.
OPCW chief Fernando Arias earlier this month expressed “
grave concern
” over the Navalny affair.
This neurotoxic product had already been used against the former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in 2018 in England.
For London, the GRU, the Russian military intelligence, is the main suspect.
The case threatens to cause new tensions within the international institution: Germany could ask the OPCW to use its new mandate to designate the authors of chemical attacks.
Despite strong objections from Moscow and its allies, a majority of member states authorized in 2018 the OPCW to designate the perpetrator of a chemical attack and no longer just to document the use of such a weapon. .
