The former president of the European Court of Human Rights this week claimed he was poisoned during a visit to Russia in late October — three days before the former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned in London.
Luzius Wildhaber, who retired last month as Europe’s most senior judge, told a Swiss newspaper that he had fallen violently ill after a three-day trip to Moscow.
The judge has been the subject of persistent criticism from Russia for upholding a series of complaints by Chechen human rights campaigners.
Russian officials dismissed Wildhaber’s allegations as laughable and said there was no evidence he had been poisoned on Russian soil. They also queried why the judge had gone public with his claims now, months after his alleged poisoning.
In the interview, Wildhaber said he had sent his blood samples to a forensic laboratory after reading about the death of Litvinenko, who was poisoned on November 1 with a massive dose of radioactive polonium-210. But when he asked for his samples, he was told the Swiss clinic had destroyed them. ”I wanted to solve the puzzle,” he said.
On Wednesday a spokesperson for the European Court of Human Rights said there was ”nothing to indicate that the cause of Wildhaber’s illness — septicaemia caused by staphylococcal infection — was suspicious”. ”The fact that Wildhaber fell ill shortly after returning from Russia provides no basis for the speculation in the media,” he said.
But officials conceded that the Kremlin had been annoyed by a series of judgements by the European Court of Human Rights and regarded it as pathologically anti- Russian and biased. — Â