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.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to