{"id":298344,"date":"2026-02-14T21:07:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-14T21:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/298344\/"},"modified":"2026-02-14T21:07:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-14T21:07:11","slug":"navalny-was-poisoned-with-rare-toxin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/298344\/","title":{"rendered":"Navalny was poisoned with ‘rare toxin’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Five European countries, including Britain, France and Germany, have accused Russia of “poisoning” opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison in 2024 using a “rare toxin”, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.<\/p>\n

“The UK, Sweden, France, Germany and The Netherlands are confident that Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a lethal toxin,” the countries said in a joint statement, following “analyses of samples” from his body.<\/p>\n

The staunch critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin died in an Arctic prison in February 2024, while serving a 19-year prison sentence.<\/p>\n

The epibatidine toxin found in the skin of dart frogs native to South America was found in samples and “highly likely resulted in his death”, the European states said.<\/p>\n

“Only the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity to deploy this lethal toxin to target Mr Navalny during his imprisonment in a Russian penal colony in Siberia, and we hold it responsible for his death,” the UK Foreign Office added in a statement.<\/p>\n

We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences<\/a><\/p>\n

Mr Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnya, said it was now “science-proven” that the Kremlin opponent had been murdered.<\/p>\n

“Two years ago, I came on stage here and said that it was Vladimir Putin who killed my husband,” Ms Navalnaya said on the sidelines of the conference.<\/p>\n

“I was of course certain that it was a murder … but back then it was just words. But today these words have become science-proven facts,” she added.<\/p>\n

Ms Navalnaya last September said that laboratory analysis of smuggled biological samples found he was killed by poisoning.<\/p>\n

“Today, beside his widow, the UK is shining a light on the Kremlin’s barbaric plot to silence his voice,” UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, who met Ms Navalnaya while attending the Munich conference, said in a statement.<\/p>\n

The countries said they had reported Russia to the world’s chemical weapons watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, over the finding.<\/p>\n

“We are further concerned that Russia did not destroy all of its chemical weapons,” the countries said, accusing Russia of breaching the Chemical Weapons Convention.<\/p>\n

Mr Navalny was previously poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok in 2020 while campaigning in Siberia and was flown to Germany on an emergency evacuation flight, where he spent months recovering.<\/p>\n

The charismatic anti-corruption campaigner had rallied hundreds of thousands across Russia in anti-Kremlin protests as he exposed the alleged ill-gotten gains of President Putin’s inner circle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five European countries, including Britain, France and Germany, have accused Russia of “poisoning” opposition leader Alexei Navalny in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":298345,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-298344","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298344\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}