Alexei Navalny was killed by Russia with dart frog toxin, 5 European countries say
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny attends a rally in support of political prisoners in Prospekt Sakharova Street in Moscow, Russia on September 29, 2019. (Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a rare lethal toxin found in poison dart frogs from South America, according to a joint statement from the UK, France, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany.
The European partners said they are confident in their determination based on analyses of samples from Navalny which confirmed the presence of the lethal toxin, Epibatidine.
“Navalny died while held in prison, meaning Russia had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison to him,” the statement read.
Alexei Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, said in a social media post she “was certain from the first day that my husband had been poisoned, but now there is proof: Putin killed Alexei with chemical weapon.”
Navalnaya said she is grateful to the countries who have worked on the investigation.
“Vladimir Putin is a murderer. He must be held accountable for all his crimes,” she said.
Russian officials did not immediately comment on the report.
The Hookers’ boat, “Soulmate,” is seen in Marsh Harbor on Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas, April 8, 2026. (ABC News)
(NEW YORK) — The husband of a woman who was reported missing in the Bahamas after going overboard on a dinghy is being questioned by police following his arrest in connection with his wife’s disappearance, his attorney said Friday.
Lynette Hooker, 55, of Michigan, and her husband, Brian Hooker, 58, had departed Hope Town on the Abaco Islands for Elbow Cay around 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, according to the Royal Bahamas Police Force. The couple was en route to their yacht, Soulmate, when bad weather caused Lynette Hooker to fall overboard, her husband told authorities.
Brian Hooker has not yet been charged following his arrest on Wednesday, his attorney confirmed to ABC News on Friday. He is being interviewed by police and there may be a charging decision afterward, the attorney, Terrel Butler, said. Police can hold him for up to 48 hours before seeking an extension, she said.
Brian Hooker has been cooperating with authorities in the ongoing investigation, his attorney said. He was injured after falling into the water while assisting police in a search of the Soulmate boat on the night of his arrest, according to Butler. He has since been treated for his injuries, which included an abrasion, she said.
The attorney said Brian Hooker is “heartbroken” over his wife’s disappearance and that his arrest has been “traumatic.”
“Brian appears completely heartbroken and deeply distressed. His primary concern and source of intense frustration is his inability to continue the search for his wife of 25 years,” Butler said in a statement after visiting her client at the police station on Thursday. “The trauma of her disappearance, coupled with his current detention as a suspect, has left him in an extremely fragile state.”
He “categorically denies the allegations made against him,” Butler said in an earlier statement.
The arrest came after multiple sources told ABC News a criminal investigation had been opened into whether there was any wrongdoing in the case.
The U.S. Coast Guard is leading the probe, according to a source familiar with the investigation.
The search is ongoing for Lynette Hooker, according to police.
Her husband told police the strong currents on Saturday took her out to sea, authorities said. She was holding the boat key when she went overboard, causing the 8-foot hard-bottom dinghy’s engine to shut off, police noted.
Her husband spoke out for the first time on Wednesday, saying he is “heartbroken over the recent boat accident.”
In a statement posted to social media, Brian Hooker said “unpredictable seas and high winds” caused his “beloved Lynette to fall from our small dinghy” near Elbow Cay.
“Despite desperate attempts to reach her, the winds and currents drove us further apart. We continue to search for her and that is my sole focus,” he said.
Brian Hooker subsequently paddled the boat back to shore, arriving at around 4 a.m. Sunday to a marina, where he reported his wife overboard to an individual who then alerted police, authorities said.
The search and rescue operation has been conducted by land, sea and air and involved multiple agencies, including the U.S. Coast Guard, the Royal Bahamas Police Force said.
Brian Hooker thanked the agencies “who have worked tirelessly in an ongoing effort to bring Lynette back to us.”
“Thank you to everyone for keeping Lynette in your thoughts and for your support of our family during this difficult time,” he said.
Butler said Brian Hooker will not be making any further statements to the media amid the ongoing investigation.
Lynette Hooker’s daughter, Karli Aylesworth, has called for a “full and complete investigation” into her mother’s disappearance.
She told ABC News her mother is fit and a good swimmer, and described what her stepfather told her about his wife’s disappearance.
“He said that my mom’s missing and that she fell out of the boat and that he threw a life jacket to her or something, and he doesn’t know if she got it or not,” she said.
“I just hope we find her,” she added.
The Hookers are avid sailors, documenting their travels on social media under the name “The Sailing Hookers.”
The U.S. State Department is “aware of reports regarding a missing American near Elbow Cay” and is “working with Bahamian authorities to provide assistance,” a spokesperson for the agency said Monday.
U.S. Navy, USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), F/A-18E/F, November 13, 2025. (Photo by Paige Brown/US Navy via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — The USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group is expected to leave the Caribbean and head towards the Middle East in the coming days, according to three U.S. officials.
The deployment of the Ford and the three destroyers accompanying it will mean that there will be two aircraft carriers in the Middle East as it joins the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group.
The deployment comes after President Donald Trump said earlier this week in an interview with Axios that he was considering sending a second carrier to the Middle East if talks with Iran about its nuclear program did not succeed.
The crew of the carrier and the supporting ships were told on Thursday about the new deployment to the Middle East, according to the officials.
The New York Times first reported the Ford’s new deployment to the Middle East.
The Ford is now expected to return to its home port in Norfolk around late April or early May, according to one U.S. official. The carrier had left Norfolk in late June for what was to be a seven-month deployment to Europe, but in late October it was redirected towards the Caribbean as part of the Trump administration’s large buildup of military forces to counter South American drug cartels.
A U.S. Southern Command spokesperson has issued provided a statement to ABC News saying that “While force posture evolves, our operational capability does not.” It adds that “SOUTHCOM forces remain fully ready to project power, defend themselves, and protect U.S. interests in the region.”
The carrier strike group will once again cross the Atlantic and the Mediterranean for a deployment that could now last as long as 10 months.
The Ford is the world’s largest carrier and its presence in the Caribbean was seen as putting pressure on then-Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his government.
Some of the aircraft aboard the carrier participated in the Jan. 3 raid in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas that led to Maduro’s capture.
A man sweeps up debris near a residential building that was hit in an airstrike in the early hours of March 27, 2026 in Tehran, Iran. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
(LONDON) — President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu kicked off their joint military campaign against Iran in late February, urging the fall of the Islamic Republic.
“When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations,” Trump said, addressing Iranians in announcing the start of “major combat operations.”
A month of unrelenting combined U.S.-Israeli strikes appears to have significantly eroded Iran’s military capabilities and killed many of its most senior leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who died alongside dozens of top Iranian officials in a series of airstrikes on his official residence in Tehran in the opening salvos of the war.
But despite Trump’s assertion that the “war has been won,” Iranian forces continue to launch attacks on Israel, regional U.S. bases and American partners across the Middle East, while commercial shipping through the strategic Strait of Hormuz remains constrained, with large numbers of cargo vessels in limbo on either side of the narrow waterway at the southern entrance to the Persian Gulf.
Trump has also asserted that there had been “complete regime change,” with the leaders the U.S. is now dealing with in recently announced negotiations “more moderate” and “much more reasonable,” the president told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl.
Trump named Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the powerful speaker of the Iranian parliament, as the direct U.S. negotiating partner, though Ghalibaf has denied the assertion.
But in Tehran, the cadre of officials – Ghalibaf among them – emerging to take the reins of power appear as committed as the slain figures they are replacing, many of them veterans of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), analysts have said.
The regime in Tehran, according to Danny Citrinowicz – the Israel Defense Forces’ former top Iran researcher, now at the Institute for National Security Studies think tank in Israel – “is weaker than it was before the conflict, but it is also more radical. The IRGC has further consolidated its influence over decision-making, eroding what little internal balance once existed within the regime.”
The war appears to have given Tehran long-term leverage over the Strait of Hormuz – a “weapon of mass disruption,” as described by Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group during an online briefing hosted by the think tank this week.
If the Islamic Republic survives the war, and its immediate aftermath by suppressing simmering anti-regime movements, its new leaders may be emboldened to retain perceived strategic advantages, chief among them control of the Strait of Hormuz, analysts who spoke to ABC News said.
That regime sentiment seems to be crystalizing. Ghalibaf, for example, told the IRNA state news agency that Iran’s strategy now rests on its control of three pillars: “missiles, the streets, and the Strait.”
Inside Iran, some sense that shift. Darius – who did not wish to use his real name for fear of reprisal – told ABC News from Tehran of a growing sentiment that “the source of legitimacy for the Islamic republic is shifting” from the clerical establishment to the IRGC.
“Now, the de facto leaders of the country are the generals in the IRGC. And they are actually running the show at the moment,” Darius said.
IRGC ascendant
The IRGC was formed shortly after the Iranian Revolution by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979, ultimately emerging as the new Islamic Republic’s primary tool for projecting its ideology and influence beyond its own borders.
The IRGC entrenched and expanded its power during the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988. With its battlefield exploits and ideological zeal, the IRGC came to embody the wartime concept of “sacred defense,” Johns Hopkins University professor Vali Nasr wrote in his recent book, “Iran’s Grand Strategy.”
Observers have long considered the IRGC to be the most powerful military, political and economic institution in Iran.
Even before the most recent U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, many experts warned that decapitation strikes or a push for regime change risked empowering the IRGC to seize the state’s other mechanisms of power – though others suggested the force had no need to openly seize control, given its de facto hold over the country.
The new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Ali Khamenei, served in an elite IRGC unit during the Iran-Iraq War, and analysts have suggested his candidacy was strongly supported by the force.
Mojtaba Khamenei’s newly appointed military adviser, Mohsen Rezaei, was drawn from the senior ranks of the IRGC, as was the new secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who was selected to replace Ali Larijani when the latter was killed by Israeli airstrikes in mid-March.
Meanwhile, IRGC veteran Ghalibaf – who has reportedly long been close to Mojtaba Khamenei – remains alive and appears to be in a position of influence, one of the few top prewar officials to have survived the U.S.-Israeli campaign.
Inside Iran, some sense that shift. Darius told ABC News from Tehran of a growing sentiment that “the source of legitimacy for the Islamic republic is shifting” from the clerical establishment to the IRGC.
“Now, the de facto leaders of the country are the generals in the IRGC. And they are actually running the show at the moment,” Darius said.
Reading the ‘mosaic’
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi credited a “mosaic defense” strategy with enabling the Iranian military to launch retaliatory strikes despite the killing of so many senior military officials in the opening hours of the U.S.-Israeli campaign.
That decentralized approach also appeared to cause some tactical confusion. Araghchi and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, for example, both denied Iranian responsibility for several reported Iranian drone and missile attacks in the region in the days after the war erupted.
A decapitated regime in Tehran may pose challenges to American negotiators seeking a peace deal, Citrinowicz said, telling ABC News that the killings have created a “worse” strategic situation by dispersing power.
The centralized decision-making power enjoyed by Ali Khamenei is no more, he said. “Now, how are you going to work with them? It’s going to be very hard to reach an agreement with them,” Citrinowicz said, referring to the newly emergent group of leaders.
Trump himself appeared to acknowledge a diffusion of power in Iran as a result of the American-Israeli assassination campaign. “We have nobody to talk to, and you know what, we like it that way,” the president said earlier this month.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told “Good Morning America” this week there are “fractures” within the Iranian leadership, though he would not say with whom the administration is in contact.
Yossi Kuperwasser – the former head of the IDF’s military intelligence research division – told ABC News that the emergence of hardliners “was to be expected.”
“Once you eliminate Khamenei, he’s not going to be replaced by some wishy-washy character, but somebody who is committed to the cause and the IRGC is going to be in charge,” Kuperwasser said.
But Kuperwasser also noted that figures currently touted as Iranian negotiators, such as Ghalibaf, might not live to see the end of the war. Indeed, Larijani was often noted as among the prime negotiating candidates before his killing. “I’d guess there are going to be more eliminations,” Kuperwasser said.
As the war progressed, both U.S. and Israeli officials have distanced themselves from earlier suggestions of regime change. Instead, officials refocused the strategic narrative on their ambitions to degrade Iran’s conventional military – especially ballistic missile – and nuclear programs.
These targets, according to Kuperwasser, were always the Israeli priority.
“Simultaneously, we are trying to weaken the regime so as to create the conditions that can be used by the people of Iran in order to promote something that can bring about the removal of the regime from power,” Kuperwasser said. But that will not necessarily occur in the short term, he added.
‘Missiles, the street, the strait’
Citrinowicz said that whatever structure emerges to negotiate with the Trump administration will likely be influenced toward more hardline demands by the killing of its predecessors.
On the nuclear file, too, “it goes without saying” that Tehran’s outlook will have shifted, Citrinowicz said. Before the war, Iranian leaders had already publicly committed not to pursue nuclear weapons, though Tehran was refusing to accept Trump’s demands of zero enrichment. Now, Citrinowicz said, the new Iranian leadership “might find themselves rushing toward a bomb.”
Iran also has more leverage in the Strait of Hormuz than it did before the conflict, even with the significant military degradation that the U.S. and Israel appear to have inflicted. Officials in Tehran have suggested that Iranian control over the strait – and the requirement for those transiting it to coordinate with Tehran and pay tolls – is the new baseline.
Rubio hinted at long-term disruption in the Persian Gulf last week. “Immediately after this thing ends, and we’re done with our objectives, the immediate challenge we’re going to face is an Iran that may decide that they want to set up a tolling system in the Strait of Hormuz,” Rubio said.
Hamidreza Azizi of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs think tank said during the Crisis Group briefing that Tehran will be set on a conclusive settlement, not merely a ceasefire that would allow the U.S. and Israel to rearm and resume the conflict at a later date, as was the case after the 12-day conflict in June.
“Deep inside Iran’s strategic thinking, there is an understanding that ceasefires are only a means for the United States and Israel to buy time,” Azizi said. While before the conflict, Tehran appeared willing to make concessions on the nuclear file and other issues, now Iranian leaders see an opportunity to achieve what they were unable to across years of negotiations.
The endgame, Azizi said, could be one in which Iran preserves “some sort of leverage” over the Strait of Hormuz or secures “substantial sanctions removal.”
For its part, Citrinowicz said the U.S. appears to be scrambling. “There are so many people in the U.S. that understand this regime, but the administration is behaving like it’s Venezuela. It’s crazy,” Citrinowicz said, referring to the American operation in January to seize Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and support his vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, as Maduro’s successor.
Last week, the U.S. delivered 15-point plan to end the war, which was widely interpreted as a blueprint for Tehran’s capitulation. Iranian demands are likewise maximalist, calling for reparations and for the U.S. to abandon its regional bases.
“Nobody’s getting their wish list,” Dalia Dassa Kaye of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations said during this week’s Crisis Group briefing.
In the meantime, the battlefield costs will rise and geopolitical implications deepen across the Middle East. “Even if this ends tomorrow,” Kaye said, the costs have already been paid. “It’s going to take years to recuperate the damage.”
“This is not something you put back in a box,” he added.
ABC News’ Desiree Adib and Somayeh Malekian contributed to this report.
