The rivalry between two chess players in Russia took a bizarre turn when one of them was accused of poisoning a game board with liquid mercury, making her opponent sick.
The suspect, chess player Amina Abakarova, 40, was captured on surveillance video taking something out of her bag and then smearing a substance on a chess board and the table at the beginning of a tournament event in Russia’s Dagestan on August 2, according to the state-run outlet Russia Today.
Abakarova then began playing against her opponent, Umayganat Osmanova, 30, but Osmanova started feeling sick about 30 minutes into the match.
Osmanova, who had seen tiny silver beads on the table, felt nauseous and dizzy, and had a metallic taste in her mouth.
“In the first minutes, I felt a lack of air and a taste of iron in my mouth,” she told Russia Today. “I had to spend about five hours on this board. I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t seen it earlier.”
Her sudden bout of sickness prompted chess officials to call for emergency services, with doctors later concluding she was poisoned by toxic fumes.
After camera footage was reviewed, Russian authorities detained and questioned Abakarova, who then apparently confessed that she had taken liquid mercury from a thermometer and tampered with the chess board to scare Osmanova.
Their rivalry took a turn for the worse when the two chess players, who had known each other since they were children, had a falling out because Abakarova violated game play rules when she brought a cellphone to a previous tournament.
Abakarova then became upset when she heard Osmanova was gossiping about the incident.
Besides Osmanova, another player and a chess official also felt sick from exposure to the mercury. Abakarova was later suspended by the Russian Chess Federation and could face jail time for the poisoning.
In the long history of chess, this seems like the first time that someone has poisoned a rival, the English Chess Federation’s director of international chess Malcolm Pein told The Telegraph.
“This is the first recorded case of somebody using a toxic substance, to my knowledge, in the history of the game of chess,” he said.
But this is certainly not the first time that poison has been deployed to take out opponents in Russia. State agents have been accused of trying to harm and kill perceived enemies of Russian President Vladimir Putin — and that’s without getting into the grisly demise of Grigori Rasputin.
Exposure to mercury, a potent neurotoxin, can lead to people feeling like they are going to vomit along with tremors, headaches, and feeling dizzy. The metallic taste in your mouth suffered by Osmanova is another sign of mercury poisoning.
When it’s in liquid form, people can get sick from just inhaling the vapors from the chemical, which is what seems to have happened to Osmanova.
While Osmanova made a quick recovery from her ordeal, prolonged exposure can lead to serious health problems and even death.
More on poisoning: Poison Specialist Accused of Poisoning His Wife
