LONDON (Reuters) – A Moscow court ruled on Tuesday that Russia’s Investigative Committee is not obliged to investigate two attempts on the life of a jailed dissident Vladimir Kara-MurzaThis is reported by independent news center Mediazona.
Moscow-born Kara-Murza, who holds both Russian and British passports, was sentenced to 25 years in prison last April on charges of treason after repeatedly condemning Russia’s war in Ukraine and lobbying for Western sanctions against Moscow. His appeal against the sentence was rejected this month.
The 42-year-old politician and former journalist has survived two poisoning attempts. He fell ill and was hospitalized in Moscow in 2015, a few months after his colleague, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, was shot while walking across a bridge near the Kremlin walls.
In 2017, Kara-Murza was put into a medically induced coma and put on a ventilator after experiencing similar symptoms.
A joint investigation led by Bellingcat subsequently found that Kara-Murza was being followed by the same Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) unit that allegedly poisoned the opposition leader. Alexei Navalny in 2020. Navalny died in an Arctic prison in February.
Kara-Murza’s wife Evgenia says the poison attempts have left him with a nervous disorder and she fears for his life in prison.
His lawyer sent requests to the Investigative Committee to investigate the poisonings, but these were rejected. The Moscow court on Tuesday rejected Kara-Murza’s appeal against these decisions, according to Mediazona, which reports on human rights and legal cases in Russia.
Kara-Murza called investigators’ claims that they had investigated the killings and interviewed witnesses “a direct, documented lie” in court, speaking via video link from the Siberian prison where he is held, Mediazona reported.
He also spoke out in support of Zhenya Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk, a Russian theater director and playwright whose trial began in Moscow on Monday, according to the report.
(Reporting and writing by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Christina Fincher)
