Because of the suspicion of illegal exports to Russia, investigators searched seven objects in several federal states on Tuesday morning. “There is a suspicion of the unauthorized export of goods to Russia,” said Kai Thomas Breas from the Stade public prosecutor’s office. The forces were active in Bremen, Bremerhaven, in the Lower Saxony district of Osterholz and in Constance in Baden-Württemberg.
NDR, WDR and the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” initially reported on the deployment of around 50 customs investigators. “We are investigating on suspicion of violating the Foreign Trade Act,” said the Stade chief public prosecutor Breas. According to him, the law enforcement agency had obtained the search warrants from the competent district court.
The Hamburg Customs Investigation Office was in charge of the searches, and their forces ended around 2 p.m., said Breas. He spoke of the fact that “extensive evidence was found”. However, the evaluation will take months, also because many documents are multilingual. The Stader prosecutors initially did not want to provide any further details.
According to information from NDR, WDR and “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, the investigators are investigating, among other things, the suspicion that chemical substances and laboratory supplies were exported to Russia without the appropriate permits. According to the report, the exported substances also include substances that can be used as raw materials for the production of chemical and biological warfare agents such as mustard gas.
According to NDR, the customs investigators are said to have searched the premises of Riol Chemie GmbH, based in Lilienthal in Lower Saxony. “A main buyer of the goods is said to have been the Moscow chemical wholesaler Khimmed, who according to Russian media reports also supplies special laboratories of the Russian military and the domestic secret service FSB,” it says.
According to the previous investigations, the Hamburg customs investigators assume that Riol Chemie delivered relatively small quantities of the chemicals to Russia, according to a press release from the broadcaster. In some cases it is said to have been only a few grams or even milligrams.
However, chemical weapons experts explained to NDR, WDR and SZ that even the smallest amounts of dangerous chemicals could play an important role in weapons programs, namely as so-called reference substances. It is said that these can be used to determine the quality of your own production.
In addition, German investigators are also said to be investigating the suspicion that Riol Chemie GmbH has also delivered substances to Russia that can be used to produce the neurotoxin Novichok. “The highly toxic warfare agent is said to have been developed in the 1970s in a secret chemical weapons program in the Soviet Union, the existence of which the Kremlin still denies,” it says.
Novichok was used in the poisoning of Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, UK, in March 2018. The Russian opposition politician Alexej Navalny is said to have been poisoned with a variant of the warfare agent in August 2020.