Navalny ‘tricked his own poisoner into confession’
Alleged Russian FSB agent caught on tape saying his job was to wash victim’s underwear to remove toxin
ALEXEI NAVALNY yesterday released an audio confession from one of the men allegedly behind his near-fatal poisoning, following a sting operation in which he called the man up and posed as a Russian intelligence official.
The confession further adds to the acute embarrassment of the Russian intelligence community after an independent investigation into Mr Navalny’s poisoning last week detailed a fully-fledged state-run operation to try to kill the opposition leader.
The 44-year-old Kremlin critic fell ill suddenly on a plane from Siberia to Moscow in August before it made an emergency landing at a nearby airport. He was eventually transferred to a hospital in Germany and lay in a coma for weeks. Several European laboratories have since confirmed that he was poisoned with the Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent. Mr Navalny yesterday published a recording of his 49-minute sting call to Konstantin Kudryavtsev, an alleged Russian intelligence agent, in which he introduces himself as an aide to the FSB intelligence agency head.
Mr Navalny said he made the call last week, a few hours before independent investigative group Bellingcat released its investigation, which identified Mr Kudryavtsev and several other agents as tailing the opposition leader for days
before poisoning him. He told the man – believed to be Mr Kudryavtsev, one of the FSB agents with medical training who were trailing him – that he needed to debrief him for a report for Nikolai Patrushev, the FSB chief.
The man described to Mr Navalny how he was sent to Siberia to make sure there were no traces of Novichok left on his clothes. He also confirmed that Mr Navalny would have been dead if the plane had not made an emergency landing. “If he were in the air for longer, and they hadn’t landed in such an abrupt way, possibly things would have not gone the way they did,” the man told Mr Navalny.
The man insisted that he was not aware of all the details of the operation but said that they had been instructed to wash Mr Navalny’s underpants, which were supposed to have the highest concentration of the toxin.
Kira Yarmysh, Mr Navalny’s spokesman, told The Daily Telegraph yesterday that his team could not categorically say how he was poisoned but that the conversation with the agent suggested the toxin may have been smeared on his underpants. Or the toxin may have been introduced another way but was most easily detected in clothes around sweatier parts of the body.
Just before hanging up, the man believed to be Mr Kudryavtsev was heard asking the fake FSB aide if it was OK that they were speaking on an unsecured phone line. Vladimir Putin last week denied involvement in Mr Navalny’s poisoning, but confirmed FSB agents were trailing him, claiming that he was a target as someone with alleged links to foreign intelligence.