Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny on Monday demanded that Russia return the clothes he was wearing on the day he fell into a coma in Siberia, calling it “a crucial piece of evidence” in the nerve agent poisoning he is being treated for at a German hospital.
In a blog post, Navalny said that the Novichok nerve agent was found “in and on” his body, and said the clothes taken off him when he was hospitalized in Siberia a month ago after collapsing on a Russian flight are “very important material evidence.”
“I demand that my clothes be carefully packed in a plastic bag and returned to me,” the 44-year-old politician and anti-corruption campaigner wrote.
Photo: AFP / Instagram account @navalny / handout
Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critic, fell ill on a domestic flight to Moscow on Aug. 20 and was taken to a hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk. He was transferred to Germany for treatment two days later.
A German military laboratory determined that Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, the same class of Soviet-era nerve agent that the UK said was used in 2018 on a former Russian spy and his daughter in England.
Navalny was kept in an induced coma for more than a week while being treated with an antidote. The hospital in Berlin last week reported taking him off the ventilator as his condition improved.
Navalny has since posted several photographs of himself in the hospital, saying that he is recovering his verbal, mental and physical abilities.
Navalny on Monday criticized Russian authorities for not launching a criminal probe into what happened to him.
“There is no criminal case in Russia, there is a ‘preliminary inquiry regarding the fact of hospitalization.’ It looks as if I didn’t fall into a coma on a plane, but rather tripped in a supermarket and broke my leg,” Navalny wrote.
Russian police started a preliminary probe — an inquiry to determine whether a criminal investigation should be launched — after Navalny was hospitalized.
Navalny and his allies on Monday argued that, according to existing regulations, the inquiry should have been completed in 30 days — those 30 days ran out on Saturday and Navalny wants his clothes back.
Since the inquiry has not resulted in a criminal case, “it can now be argued that the Russian state has officially decided to ignore the poisoning of Navalny,” Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said in a video statement on Monday.
Russian police on Monday said that the inquiry was still ongoing.
The Kremlin has repeatedly said that it sees no grounds for a criminal case, as Russian laboratories and the hospital in Omsk found no indications of poisoning. Other European laboratories have backed Germany’s stance that Navalny was poisoned with independent tests of their own.
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