Navalny likely poisoned in hotel room
Colleagues of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said yesterday that a water bottle with a trace of the Novichok nerve agent was found in his hotel room in the Siberian city of Tomsk after he fell ill on a flight from there to Moscow last month.
Navalny later was flown to Germany, where he was kept in an induced coma for more than two weeks as he was treated with an antidote at Berlin’s Charite hospital. Members of his team accused the Kremlin of involvement in the poisoning, charges that Russian officials have vehemently denied.
The Kremlin has bristled at calls from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders to answer questions about the poisoning, urging Germany to provide its evidence.
A video posted on Navalny’s Instagram account yesterday showed members of his team in plastic gloves inspecting his hotel room in Tomsk shortly after he left the city on August 20 and collapsed on a flight home. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, where he was hospitalised before being taken to
Berlin two days later on a medevac plane.
Navalny’s Instagram post said the team went to the room an hour after learning that he had fallen ill, accompanied by a lawyer, and packed halfempty plastic water bottles and unspecified other items for further inspection. In the video post, someone who appears to be a hotel employee could be heard telling members of the Navalny team that they need to ask police before taking any items from the room, and one of them refuses to do that.
“Two weeks later, a German laboratory found a trace of Novichok on a bottle from the Tomsk hotel room,” they said. “And then another three labs that took Alexei’s samples proved that he was poisoned with it. Now we understand: It was done before he left his room to go to the airport.”
Georgy Alburov, a close colleague of Navalny who inspected his hotel room in Tomsk, said in a live broadcast on YouTube that German experts said the bottle wasn’t the source of the Novichok and only had a trace amount of the nerve agent, probably left by Navalny when he drank from it after he had already been poisoned.
Alburov said Navalny probably was poisoned in the hotel, adding that its management had refused to show them recordings from surveillance cameras. He said police in Tomsk later seized computer servers containing the recordings.