Washington Post columnist Sergey Georgyevich Kara-Murza was poisoned by the same group of FSB spies accused of poisoning Alexei Navalny, the Bellingcat investigative outlet reported Thursday.

Kara-Murza, a Russian politician and opposition activist who lives outside Washington with his wife and children, was poisoned twice — in 2015 and 2017. Both incidents left him in prolonged comas while his vital organs shut down.

Using travel records, Bellingcat concluded that the same FSB unit that tracked Navalany for years and had been near him the same day he was poisoned also trailed Karza-Murza before his first and second medical emergencies.

“Crucially, members of this FSB unit had shadowed Kara-Murza on a campaign trip outside Moscow that ended less than 48 hours before his first poisoning incident,” the Bellingcat reported. “The FSB unit then resumed following Kara-Murza approximately five months after he returned from treatment in the USA. The same team would continue tailing him until he was poisoned for the second time on 1 February 2017.”

The FBI in 2017 concluded that Kara-Murza was poisoned deliberately but didn’t reveal the substance used against him, citing “national security reasons.”

The Washington Post editorial board last month wrote that since the bureau is “investigating this matter as a case of intentional poisoning,” it should release the details. “It has refused to release the results of its laboratory tests, which might show whether Mr. Kara-Murza, like Mr. Navalny and other Kremlin targets, was attacked with a banned chemical weapon.”

Kara-Murza, like Navalny, is a prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Navalny was stalked, trailed, and spied on for more than three years before Russian intelligence agents allegedly poisoned him with a novichok-type nerve agent in August 2020.  

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