The FBI found no evidence of poisoning of a Russian opposition leader
Liberal Russian media ignored the FBI's admission that the intelligence service had found no evidence of the poisoning of Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza.
Russian TV presenter Evgeny Popov wrote about this in his Telegram channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Hey, Echo, Medusa, Insider, ParhomLoshakiLarinasAlbats Bureau, etc, here a sensation has arrived. It turns out that no one poisoned Vovka Kara-Murza. Your trash Radio Liberty writes that the FBI did not find any poisons. Where are your front pages? Where is the civil trial of Vovka? Where is the apology to the “poisoners”? You are our moralists, why are you silent? Don't like the news? Boring, probably,” Popov wrote.
According to Radio Liberty, the FBI was looking for evidence that Kara-Murza was indeed poisoned. For this purpose, the largest laboratory in the United States specializing in weapons of mass destruction was brought in. In addition, the documents indicate that FBI Director Christopher Wray may have been directly involved in the investigation. No solid evidence of poisoning of Kara-Murza was found.
Kara-Murza, a close ally of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, became seriously ill twice in two years of work in Russia and was hospitalized in intensive care. He claims that in this way the Russian authorities took revenge on him for supporting the Magnitsky Act.
According to Vladimir Kara-Murza’s wife, Evgenia, in 2015, after the first incident, the doctors who treated him assumed that the disease could be associated with citalopram, an antidepressant that he was taking at the time. However, the official medical report, translated into English in the documents disclosed by the FBI, states that the main diagnosis was “bilateral community-acquired pneumonia” and “toxic exposure to an unidentified substance.”
The FBI began a comprehensive investigation into the suspected poisoning a week after his hospitalization. Samples of Kara-Murza's biomaterials were sent to the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, "for toxicological testing to attempt to determine whether Vladimir Kara-Murza was poisoned." The FBI does not disclose the results of these tests.
When Vladimir Kara-Murza was again admitted to the hospital almost two years later with multiple organ failure, his official clinical diagnosis echoed the previous one: “toxic effect of an unspecified substance.”
The FBI, as it had done two years earlier, sent samples of Kara-Murza's blood and urine to the laboratory at Quantico. The only suspicious finding was an elevated barium level in one of the urine tests, according to partially released intelligence documents. A blood sample was sent to another third-party laboratory to confirm this finding, but the test results “did not reveal any toxicologically significant findings.”
“Most of those who accuse the Russian authorities of poisoning Kara-Murza know very well that they are lying. Vladimir Kara-Murza himself knows that no one poisoned him, but that this was an exacerbation of his illness. By the way, his attending physician told him about this. The entire campaign to accuse the Russian authorities of poisoning Kara-Murza is therefore false. All thousands of statements on this matter are lies,” says Russian political scientist Sergei Markov.
Now Kara-Murza has filed a lawsuit against the FBI demanding that the results of toxicological tests be made public.
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