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Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, hospitalized Sunday while he was in prison, was reportedly poisoned by an unknown chemical, according to his lawyer Olga Mikhaylova. Since the dawn of time, poisoning has been a method used to attack someone else's life or to kill oneself.
In 399 BC, Socrates killed himself by swallowing hemlock in his cell. Rasputin would have survived cyanide poisoning in the early 20th century. Would Queen Cleopatra have committed suicide by absorbing a mixture of opium, hemlock and aconite? Alexander the Great would have been poisoned with white hellebore? Would Napoleon have been poisoned with arsenic? Since the dawn of time and until today, poisoning remains a method for eliminating opponents or killing oneself. A brief overview of "famous poisonings".
The Skripal case
In 2018, the former Russian double agent and his daughter Yulia are found unconscious in a shopping center in Salisbury (southern England) and hospitalized in a serious condition.
London accuses Moscow of being behind this poisoning at Novitchok , a powerful Soviet-style innervating agent, in retaliation for its collaboration with British intelligence. The Kremlin denies. The case provokes a diplomatic crisis.
Sergei Skripal and his daughter leave the hospital in the following months.
The VX, weapon of mass destruction
In 2017 at the Kuala Lumpur airport, two women are throwing a substance in the face of Kim Jong-nam , the half-brother in disgrace of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The scene is filmed by surveillance cameras. He dies while being transferred to the hospital.
Traces of VX, a neurotoxic agent classified as a weapon of mass destruction, are found on him. North Korea denies any involvement.
A live suicide
The images went around the world. In November 2017, former Bosnian Serb forces commander Slobodan Praljak commits suicide by swallowing a cyanide vial during his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague: 20 years in prison for crimes against humanity between 1992 and 1995. He died a few hours later.
Natural death ?
In 2012, Russian businessman Alexander Perepilichny is found dead in front of his property in Surrey. Natural death, believes the police. But analyzes requested by a life insurance company reveal that he has ingested a molecule associated with gelsemium, a toxic plant from Asia.
Polonium-210
Alexander Litvinenko, former agent of the FSB (Russian secret service), opponent of the Kremlin in exile, died in 2006 poisoning polonium-210 , very toxic radioactive substance. A British inquiry, nearly ten years later, establishes the culpability of two Russian performers who had taken a tea with the victim in a hotel in London and concluded the responsibility of Moscow, which denies. Alexander Litvinenko was investigating possible links between Moscow and mafia networks.
Yasser Arafat
In 2004, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died at age 75 at the Percy military hospital near Paris. Rumors of poisoning involving Israel come immediately. In 2012, a judicial investigation is opened in France following a complaint filed by his widow after the discovery of polonium on his personal belongings, but justice pronounces a dismissal.
The survey will not dispel the doubts of Palestinians, fueled by a survey of Swiss experts who consider the thesis of poisoning " more consistent ". French and Russian experts, meanwhile, have dismissed this track.
→ To (re) read: Poison, discreet weapon of special services
The hero of the Orange Revolution
In 2004, the Ukrainian opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko , hero of the Orange Revolution, falls seriously ill in the middle of the presidential campaign against the favorite of Moscow, Viktor Yanukovych. Austrian doctors identify three months later a poisoning with dioxin. His pockmarked and deformed face still bears traces of the disease. Yushchenko was still elected to Ukraine's leadership in January 2005.
An Indonesian Human Rights Defender
In 2004, Indonesian human rights defender Munir Saïd Thalib died in excruciating suffering on board a plane bound for Amsterdam after drinking a poisoned drink during his stopover in Singapore. Arsenic was found during the autopsy.
He was the main facilitator of the Commission for the Missing and Victims of Violence (Kontras), an organization denouncing abuses committed by the Indonesian military under the Suharto regime.
Saved by the King of Jordan
In 1997, in Amman, Mossad agents, Israeli intelligence services, inject poison into the neck of the head of the political bureau of the Islamic movement Hamas Khaled Meshaal.
Fallen into a coma, the Palestinian leader is saved by the intervention of King Hussein of Jordan, who demands Israel's antidote in exchange for the release of the two perpetrators of the attack.
Georgi Markov
In 1978, during the Cold War, while waiting for a bus in London, the Bulgarian dissident writer is stung in the thigh by a stranger who drops his umbrella. Markov, who has a high fever, dies four days later. The autopsy reveals the presence in his leg of a capsule of the size of a pinhead, containing a violent poison, ricin, 6000 times more powerful than cyanide and lethal without antidote.
An anticolonialist
In 1960, the Cameroonian nationalist Félix Roland Moumié went to Switzerland to buy weapons. A French secret agent posing as a journalist offers him a meeting in a restaurant. He pours thallium into the glasses of the militant anticolonialist who dies a few days later.
(With AFP)