They find traces of poison in a bottle from which the Russian opponent drank before he left for the airport.
Russian opponent Alexei Navalni was poisoned with group nerve agent Novichok at the hotel where he was staying in the Siberian city of Tomsk, his team said on Thursday in an Instagram post.
On Naval’s account, his colleagues have uploaded a video as evidence of this complaint with images from the opponent’s room, which were recorded immediately after his blackout was known on the plane he was travelling to Moscow.
In the images, Navalni’s team members collect bottles of water that were subsequently sent to Germany, where the opposition leader recovers from poisoning.
Navalni’s surroundings indicate that the German laboratory has found traces of a nerve agent in the water bottles located in his hotel room in Tomsk, from where he set off for Moscow before feeling indisposed in mid-flight on 20 August.
Where did the bottle come from?
“Where did the bottle come from?… It’s a bottle of Tomsk’s hotel room, where Navalni and our film crew stayed,” explains the opponent’s team on Instagram. “Now we understand: the poisoning occurred before I left the room to go to the airport,” they point out.
OPAQ participation
The German Government, which already assumes that Navalni was poisoned and has requested explanations from the Russian authorities, has requested intervention in the case of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPAQ), which has confirmed “technical assistance” to clarify the “alleged poisoning”.
A team of experts has collected samples from Navalni for independent analysis and the result of which is still unknown. According to Berlin, a French and a Swedish laboratory have also verified with their own tests that the Russian opponent was intoxicated with a nerve agent.
Navalni, meanwhile, continues to improve at the Charité hospital in the German capital, until which he was transferred on 22 August. After waking up last week from the induced coma, the activist is already getting out of bed and this week shared his first image downtown to account for his progressive recovery.