British officials say a toxin derived from a poison dart frog was used to kill Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison, and they're now directly accusing the Kremlin. The UK's Foreign Office identified the substance as epibatidine, saying there's no innocent reason for the chemical's presence in samples taken from Navalny's body, per the BBC. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, speaking at the Munich Security Conference, said that "only the Russian government had the means, motive, and opportunity" to use the toxin on Navalny while he was in custody.
The poison dart frog is typically found in South America, per CBS News. Britain has notified the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, alleging Russia violated the Chemical Weapons Convention. The UK's assessment is backed by Sweden, France, the Netherlands, and Germany, which have joined London in publicly blaming Moscow. Per the AP, Russia has consistently denied involvement in Navalny's death, which authorities said followed a brief stroll at his Siberian penal colony on Feb. 16, 2024, after which the 47-year-old complained of feeling unwell and collapsed. Navalny's family confirmed his death later that day.
Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner and the country's most prominent opposition figure, had already survived a 2020 poisoning with a Novichok nerve agent and was jailed after returning to Russia from treatment in Germany. His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, has long maintained that he was murdered by poisoning while serving his sentence and said last year that tests on smuggled biological samples conducted in two nations indicated he was killed, though she didn't then identify the substance and urged the laboratories to publish their findings. "I was, of course, certain that it was a murder ... but back then it was just words," she said on the sidelines of the security gathering, per AFP. "But today these words have become science-proven facts."
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