Evidence surfaces in Russia poisoning
Immediately after Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, showed symptoms of poisoning last month, members of his team rushed to the Siberian hotel where he had been staying and grabbed anything that could possibly be used as evidence — including a water bottle that tests showed was tainted with a highly toxic nerve agent.
In a video posted on Instagram, members of Navalny’s team swiftly donned rubber gloves and scoured his room at the Xander Hotel in Tomsk, packing evidence into blue plastic bags.
The plastic water bottle, Navalny’s team and German investigators say, eventually helped German military scientists determine that the opposition leader had been poisoned with a class of chemical weapon called a Novichok, a Soviet-designed poison that Russian operatives have used in at least one previous assassination attempt.
Navalny began choking and screaming on a flight to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk.
Immediately after Navalny’s plane made an emergency landing, his aides spoke with members of the team who had stayed in Tomsk to tell them what had happened, according to Navalny’s Instagram post.
“At that moment, they did the one thing that was possible,” the statement said. “They called a lawyer, went to the hotel room, which Navalny had just left, and began to identify, record and pack up everything that they found, including bottles of water from the hotel.”
When Navalny was flown from a Siberian hospital to Berlin on Aug. 22, the evidence went with him.
An analysis by German military scientists at the Institute for Pharmacology and Toxicology in Munich found traces of a nerve agent in the Novichok family in Navalny’s blood and urine, as well as on one of the bottles. Based on the German findings, Navalny’s team, according to the Instagram post, now believes that he was poisoned in that hotel room, not at the airport as they had originally suspected.
On Thursday, the European Parliament passed a nonbinding resolution calling for an international investigation into Russia’s possible use of a chemical weapon as well as “ambitious restrictive” measures, including financial sanctions against “corrupt individuals.”
“The attempted assassination of Navalny was part of a systemic effort to silence dissident voices in Russia,” a statement by the European Parliament said.