German police said they were investigating the possibility that two dissidents were poisoned by Russia after an anti-government meeting in Berlin at the end of April organized by a Russian critic of the Kremlin. Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Berlin police told Reuters they had “launched an investigation” following a report by German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, citing the Russian opposition website Agentstvo, that the two men showed symptoms of possible poisoning.

A Berlin police spokesman said the case had been assigned to the State Protection Agency, which is responsible for terrorism and political crimes.

One person, identified as a journalist who had recently left Russia, had unspecified health problems during the event, but said they may have started before.

The media add that the person then went to Berlin’s Charité hospital where Russian deputy Alexei Navalny, who had been poisoned in August 2020, was being treated.

The second participant is Natalia Arno, director of the NGO Free Russia Foundation in the United States where she has been living for ten years after being forced to flee Russia.

Arno then traveled to Prague for a series of meetings on the situation in Russia. There, as Agentstvo reports, she developed symptoms and also discovered that her hotel room had been broken into.

Departing the next day for the US, he contacted a hospital there as well as the authorities.

She posted a message on Facebook this week where she described the problems she was feeling, “intense pain” and “numbness”, saying the first “strange symptoms” appeared before she arrived in Prague. He added that he still has symptoms but is feeling better.