Russia Navalny publishes his first photo after coming out of a coma and says he is willing to return to Russia
The nerve agent used to poison Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was detected in an empty water bottle from his hotel room in the Siberian city of Tomsk.
This suggests that he was poisoned there and not at the airport, as was initially thought.
And now it is known that it was Navalny's own team that safeguarded the evidence so that the crime could not be covered up.
Several collaborators, along with a lawyer, searched, cataloged and unpacked the objects found in the room, including the plastic water bottles.
Those bottles are the ones that have served to prove that the nerve agent Novichok, a poison developed by the Soviet army, was used, although Russia denies it and says there is no evidence.
Navalny was supposed to fly back to Moscow on August 20, but saved his life because his plane made an emergency landing in Omsk when he began to feel very bad, scream and lose consciousness.
His collaborators were still in Tomsk to finish the investigation (which Navalny had led the previous days) into corruption in that area.
A video posted on Navalny's Instagram account shows members of his team searching the room he had just left at the Xander Hotel in Tomsk on August 20.
It is recorded an hour after they learned that Navalny had fallen ill under suspicious circumstances.
Navalny's team is seen wearing protective gloves placing items in blue plastic bags.
The empty hotel room appears, and two bottles of water are on a desk and another on the nightstand
.
It was a decisive minute in room 239 at the Xander Hotel.
"It was decided to gather everything that could be hypothetically useful and hand it over to the doctors in Germany. It was quite obvious that the case would not be investigated in Russia," they say in the dissident's team.
"Two weeks later, a German laboratory found traces of Novichok precisely in the water bottle in Tomsk's hotel room and then more laboratories that took analysis of Alexei confirmed that this was what poisoned Navalny."
"Now we know: [the poisoning] was done before he left his hotel room to go to the airport,"
says the team, which has released all the details online.
On September 4, the German publication 'Der Spiegel' already reported that
traces of Novichok
were found
on the neck of the bottle from which Navalny was drinking
, as well as on the politician's blood, urine and skin samples.
German journalists pointed out that this bottle is one of the keys that allowed chemists in their country to determine the type of poisonous substance.
Later the conclusions about Novichok were also confirmed by experts from France and Sweden.
The first image of the opponent in the Berlin hospital.REUTERS
Previously, Navalny's aides had said they suspected he had been poisoned from a cup of tea that he drank at Tomsk airport.
But subsequent analyzes have pointed directly to the hotel as a crime scene.
Russia has barely investigated the event, arguing that it will not investigate what happened until it is clear how it was poisoned.
But at the same time, he says he needs to see more medical tests before he can open a formal criminal investigation.
A 100% Soviet poison
The Novichok - which means 'rookie' in Russian - is a toxic agent created in the Soviet Union that was already used to poison former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the British city of Salisbury in 2018. They survived, but another woman Dawn Sturgess died after picking up a contaminated bottle she found in the trash.
Despite the evidence, which even showed two Russian GRU agents (the military intelligence services) making a quick trip to the British town, Moscow also denied having carried out that attack.
Even the Russian channel RT - which broadcasts the official Kremlin line - broadcast an interview with these two agents assuring that they went to Salisbury from Moscow because they liked the city for sightseeing.
When it was known that Navalny was in a coma, the director of RT, Margarita Simonian, scoffed, recommending that the opponent be given "a spoonful of sugar"
to solve what Russian doctors described as a possible metabolic imbalance due to low blood sugar.
The trail of Russian poisonings these years has been educating potential victims.
Anton Timofeyev, a member of Navalny's team and who appears in the video collecting samples from the hotel, said that he had taken the Skripal case into account at the time.
"We were thinking that some hotel employee would go get these bottles," he told Reuters: and in that case, "of course, they would have been poisoned."
What role exactly does the plastic bottle play in the most serious case of poisoning of an opponent that Vladimir Putin's Russia has experienced?
As Vladimir Uglev, who worked in the development of Novichok in the seventies, explained to this newspaper, it
is necessary to wear gloves and avoid breathing when handling a container that contains this toxic agent
, and it is necessary to dispose of all the material as soon as possible.
The perpetrators of the poisoning and the Navalny collaborators who collected the samples were in grave danger when handling these objects.
Bottles of water in hotel room.REUTERS
"He did not drink poison"
Most likely, there were no poisonous substances in the water in those bottles.
Uglev himself explained to EL MUNDO that if the poison had entered the body of the politician orally, "it would not have arrived at the airport alive."
According to the scientist's calculations, Uglev received approximately 20% of the lethal dose.
Enough to disable Navalny.
The substance entered his body after skin contact with the poisoned surface
, probably after being placed on his underwear or bedding.
Navalny touched the substance and then touched the bottle.
So the clothing analysis could also provide clues in that sense.
Navalny's wife, Yulia Navalnaya, had to fight with Russian agents when they tried to take the suitcase containing the politician's clothes.
Deleting tests
Navalny's team has continued to investigate.
And he found out that the hotel has an extensive video surveillance system, which
records almost everything that is happening
, also near Navalny's room.
The publication on the Proekt website, which disseminates the investigations of the opposition team, states that the camera recordings were "seized", but does not specify who exactly did it.
Navalny's team does not specify who exactly and in what way these things were taken abroad, but they
say that the objects were stored with the greatest possible care
.
A central character appears to be Maria Pevchij, who is the head of the research department at FBK, the Navalny anti-corruption foundation, although she lives in London.
After Navalny's poisoning,
Maria Pevchij's name appeared in the pro-Kremlin media
, which tried to spread the idea that she might be involved in the poisoning of the politician with the complicity of the British secret services.
She was accused of having an intimate relationship with Navalny and that she was the one who could poison him
.
Pevchij avoids talking to the media but has confirmed to the Russian website 'Meduza' that she entered the room to remove the bottle.
They arrived barely an hour after the Navalny spokeswoman gave the notice of what had happened as soon as they landed in Omsk.
Each bottle was packaged separately, the packages were marked and signed.
The hotel manager allowed this 'check-in' and was at the door of the room.
At first, he argued that objects owned by the hotel (sheets, furniture, etc.) can only be taken out of the room with the permission of the police
.
But the bottles do not belong to that property, so they were able to take them with them.
Navalny's personal items have also been taken to Germany, where the investigation that Moscow did not want to do is underway.
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GermanyImproves Navalny's health: no mechanical ventilation and "able to get out of bed"
RussiaThe coalition of Alexei Navalny advances in the city where he was poisoned
Answer: Russia will investigate the Navalny poisoning, but as foreign interference
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