Novichok, Russia's alleged assassination weapon of choice

It's the most breathtakingly blatant assassination attempt since two Russian GRU military intelligence officers casually sprayed deadly Novichok nerve agent onto the handle of the front door of Sergei Skripal, Russian double agent, in Salisbury in 2018. Alexei Navalny, Russian opposition leader and a vociferous critic of Vladimir Putin, is lying in a coma in a hospital intensive care unit in Berlin, suffering from Novichok poisoning, according to the German authorities. The nerve agent was by all accounts slipped into his tea while he was at an airport in Siberia or during the flight he took back to Moscow on August 20. If it happened while he was flying, surely an investigation of all the other passengers should uncover the suspect or suspects. If it was administered before he got on the flight, then something must have gone wrong because this military-grade nerve agent developed by the Russians in a secretive laboratory normally takes no more than two minutes to get a reaction. But Navalny was presumably feeling all right when he sat down in his seat on the aircraft. It was only mid-flight that he suddenly became ill, and the captain had to divert the plane. So the Novichok deliverer/assassin must have been on board. The Kremlin has denied any involvement or knowledge of this attempt to kill Putin's main political opponent. So that's ok then. Now we have to look for other suspects! Whatever the international community discovers in the promised full investigation,the Kremlin will continue to deny any part in the attempt to murder Navalny. If the Skripal incident is anything to go by, no Russian will ever be arrested, let alone found guilty in a court and sent to prison. Many Putin critics in Russia, including investigative journalists inquiring into government corruption, have been found dead in mysterious circumstances over recent years. But the Navalny case is no mystery. He died from ingesting Novichok nerve agent, fed to him by someone who had access to this killer agent from government stocks and who intended to kill him.