Poison probe for Russian lawyer

Police in Strasbourg have started an inquiry into the suspected poisoning of a top Russian human rights lawyer, a court official said Tuesday.

Lawyer Karinna Moskalenko, who is representing the family of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya in a trial, said that her husband had found a large quantity of "a substance similar to mercury" in their car on Monday and she had subsequently filed a complaint with police.

"I feel worse and worse. My children also feel bad," Moskalenko said.

Assistant prosecutor in Strasbourg Claude Palpacuer said: "It could be" mercury poisoning "but that has to be confirmed by a second analysis."

He said that the quantity found would not be enough to endanger life.

Mrs Moskalenko who travels frequently to Strasbourg because of her work with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), is suffering from "headaches, nausea and watery eyes," according to one of her colleagues, Anna Stavitskaya.

She added: "This appears to have been an attempt at intimidation."

Mrs Moskalenko will be forced to miss an appearance in court in Moscow today for a preliminary hearing ahead of the main trial of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya – a critic of the Kremlin who was shot dead outside her home in central Moscow in 2006.

As well as being a lawyer for Politkovskaya's family, Mrs Moskalenko also represents jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and has brought dozens of cases involving abuses in Chechnya and Russian prisons to the ECHR in Strasbourg.

If confirmed as a poisoning the case would carry echoes of the 2006 poisoning murder of former security service officer Alexander Litvinenko in London, which has damaged relations between Britain and Russia.

Photo:Afp/Johanna Leguerre