Enlarge / Amina Abakarova allegedly spreading mercury on her rival’s chess board.
Russia is no stranger to unique poisonings. State agents have been known to use everything from polonium-laced tea to the deadly nerve agent “novichok” when making assassination attempts against both defectors in the UK and internal political rivals like Alexei Navalny. But a new “first” in the long history of poisonings was opened this month in the Russian republic of Dagestan, where a 40-something chess player named Amina Abakarova attempted to poison a rival by depositing liquid mercury on and around her chess board.
Malcolm Pein, the English Chess Federation’s director of international chess, told the UK’s Telegraph that he had “never seen anything like this before… This is the first recorded case of somebody using a toxic substance, to my knowledge, in the history of the game of chess.” Usually, he said, chess rivals confine themselves to “psychological” tactics.
Oliver Carroll, a Ukraine war correspondent for The Economist, summed up the situation with some social media snark: “I know that on the standards of Russian doping it’s perhaps only a 7 out of 10. But still…”
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