Cloak & daggerName your poison: Exotic toxins fell Kremlin foes
The suspected poisoning of anti-Kremlin activist Pyotr Verzilov in Moscow — just a few months after nerve-agent poisonings in Britain that led to one death and left three others severely ill — conjures up memories of other Kremlin foes who have fallen victim to toxic attacks in the Vladimir Putin era and previously.
Doctors in Berlin, where Russian-Canadian Verzilov was flown on September 15 after falling seriously ill days earlier, said it was "highly plausible" that he was poisoned.
A longtime opponent of Russian President Putin as a member of the punk protest band Pussy Riot and dissident art troupe Voina, Verzilov's doctors in Germany said on September 18 that something disrupted the nerves that regulate his internal organs.
Verzilov's case comes just months after former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found unconscious in a park in the English city of Salisbury.
A British public inquiry found that the Skripals had been poisoned with the deadly nerve agent Novichok and alleged that the attack was carried out by Russian state agents, later identified as two men traveling under the names Aleksandr Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov.
Less than four months later, Britons Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess were taken to a hospital in Salisbury in critical condition and found to have also been poisoned by Novichok. Sturgess died on July 8.
Skripal, a 67-year-old former Russian Army colonel, and his adult daughter eventually recovered after months of intensive hospital treatment.
Skripal was convicted in 2006 by a Russian court for "high treason in the form of espionage" on charges that he had given the names of Russian agents in Europe to Britain's MI6 intelligence agents during the 1990s.
The attack on the Skripals expanded the list of cases in which Kremlin opponents or critics have fallen ill from poisoning over the years, sometimes fatally, in circumstances that have raised suspicions of KGB-style assassinations.
While the Skripals were hospitalized, London police assistant commissioner Mark Roley told BBC that authorities "have to be alive to the fact of state threats as illustrated by the [Aleksandr] Litvinenko case."