Russia dismisses claim Putin critic was poisoned
MOSCOW: The Kremlin on Tuesday brushed off allegations that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is in a coma in a German hospital, was poisoned and said there have been no grounds for a criminal investigation so far because the politician’s condition may have been triggered by other causes.
The insistence by the government that Navalny wasn’t necessarily poisoned came a day after German doctors said tests indicated that he was poisoned and elicited outrage from Navalny’s allies, who say the Kremlin was behind the illness of its most prominent critic.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the accusations, saying they “absolutely cannot be true and are rather an empty noise... We do not intend to take it seriously”.
Peskov saw no grounds for launching a criminal investigation into Navalny’s condition at this stage, saying that it could have been triggered by a variety of causes, and determining one should come first.
“If a substance (that caused the condition) is found, and if it is determined that it is poisoning, then there will be a reason for an investigation,” Peskov said.
Navalny, a politician and corruption investigator who is one of Putin’s fiercest critics, fell ill on a flight back to Moscow from Siberia on Thursday and was taken to a hospital in Omsk after the plane made an emergency landing.
Over the weekend, he was transferred to the Charité hospital in Berlin, where doctors on Monday said they found indications of “cholinesterase inhibitors” in his system.