German authorities have launched an investigation after a Russian dissident journalist who criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine raised suspicions that he was poisoned in Germany.
According to the British daily Guardian on the 17th (local time), Yelena Kostuchenko, who was a reporter for the Russian independent newspaper ‘Novaya Gazeta’, escaped to Berlin, Germany, after obtaining information that Russia was trying to assassinate her in March last year. At the time, he was covering the area near Mariupol, Ukraine, one of the fiercest battlefields of the Ukraine War.
After living in Berlin, he visited Munich on October 17 of the same year due to visa issues. This is because the Russian independent media먹튀검증 ‘Meduza’ needed a visa to Ukraine to continue reporting on the war.
It was from this day that symptoms of poison poisoning appeared in Kostuchenko. According to Kostuchenko’s article in Medusa and the American media ‘n + 1’, he complained of severe headaches, shortness of breath and nausea on the train back from Munich to Berlin. His face, fingers and toes began to swell, and his sweat smelled strong and strange, like rotten fruit, he said.
Kostuchenko was examined at the hospital 10 days after her first symptoms appeared. As a result, the liver enzyme level was 5 times higher than normal, and blood was detected in the urine. Accordingly, he raised suspicion of assassination using poison.
In this regard, German authorities have launched an investigation. Kostuchenko is said to have been investigated by German investigators who investigated the assassination of Zelimhan Hangoshivili, a Chechen exile. Zelimhan Hangoshivili was shot and killed by a Russian in a park in Berlin in 2019.
German authorities closed the investigation in May this year due to lack of evidence, but resumed the investigation two months later. The Berlin prosecutor’s office also confirmed the resumption of the investigation, the Guardian reported. Prosecutors are said to be investigating the unidentified assailant.
Kostuchenko developed her dream of becoming a journalist under the influence of Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in 2006 while covering human rights abuses by Russian government forces in Chechnya. He later won several awards for his coverage of the 2011 “Jinaojin massacre”, in which at least 14 protesters were killed by police in an oil-producing town in western Kazakhstan.
The New York-based nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists ( CPJ ) has called on German authorities to investigate Kostuchenko’s allegations of an assassination attempt with transparency. It also called on Georgian authorities to investigate the alleged poisoning attempt against Russian radio journalist Irina Babloyan.