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The German government announced on Wednesday that tests performed on samples taken from Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny positively showed the presence of the nerve agent Novichok, Fox News reported.

Navalny, a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, fell mysteriously ill on a flight back to Moscow from Siberia on Aug. 20 and was taken to a hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk after his plane was forced to make an emergency landing.

He was transferred to a German hospital two days later, where doctors said last week there had been signs that the outspoken politician had been poisoned.

In a statement, the laboratory that carried out the toxicology tests said there was "unequivocal evidence of a chemical nerve agent" present.

According to German news magazine Der Spiegel, experts at the German hospital sought advice from Porton Down, Britain’s secretive laboratory for research on chemical and biological weapons, because of possible similarities with the 2018 Sergei Skripal attack. In that case, Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with military-grade Novichok.

The German government’s official statement described the attack on Navalny as an “astounding act” and asked the Russian government to offer an explanation.

“It is a dismaying event that Alexei Navalny was the victim of an attack with a chemical nerve agent in Russia,” Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said in a statement. “The German government condemns this attack in the strongest terms.”