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Navalny said he phoned his killer
| Reading time: 3 minutes
Alexej Navalny posted this photo of himself on his Instagram account at the end of September.
Source: dpa-infocom GmbH
The poison is said to have been in his underpants: Russian opposition member Alexej Navalny telephones a secret service agent under a false name. In the conversation, the man confesses to the murder, according to Navalny, and explains why the victim survived.
VFour months after he was poisoned, Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny said he called the alleged perpetrator. On Monday, the opposition activist posted on YouTube a recording of a telephone conversation with a suspected agent of the Russian internal secret service FSB, who admitted to the attack. Navalny pretended to be an assistant to the head of the Russian Security Council in the December 14 conversation, to gain the trust of the FSB employee. The call came in the course of an investigation by various outlets, including the news magazine “Spiegel”. According to this, an FSB “assassin squad” had been in Navalny for years.
Navalny collapsed on a domestic flight in Siberia in August. Findings from various Western laboratories later showed war agent Novichok in his body. The alleged FSB man said in the now-posted phone call that the poison was adhering to the inside of Nawalny’s underwear.
The 44-year-old opposition member likely only survived because the flight did not last long enough and paramedics treated him so quickly, the man said. When Navalny collapsed, the pilot brought the plane to the ground in Omsk, where the anti-Kremlin was taken to hospital. Such a “chain of events” is “the worst factor that can happen in our work,” the man said by phone.
Navalny had explained to his interlocutor that he would have to deal with the failed attack by the head of the Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev. He made the phone call from Germany because, after weeks of treatment at the Berlin Charité, he was still there for rehabilitation to regain strength.
Initially, the Russian authorities did not react to the phone call. Navalny interpreted this as new evidence of the FSB’s guilt. He had repeatedly referred to the head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, as the mastermind behind the contract killing. There was a large police presence at the address of the exposed suspect’s house in Moscow, as Navalny employee Lyubov Sobol showed on Twitter.
Last week, various media outlets published an investigation that found that at least eight Russian intelligence agents had carried out the attack on Navalny. At his big annual press conference, President Vladimir Putin then spoke of an observation of Navalny by Russian intelligence agents, but clearly denied the poisoning. “If someone had wanted that, they would have finished it,” Putin said, referring to the murder charges.
Navalny himself, his staff, but also many experts have already described Putin’s words as a partial confession. Russia had denied that Putin’s opponent had been poisoned and had stated that he had destroyed all of Novichok’s supplies. Parts of the Russian leadership even accused the Western secret services of having built the case to pillory and punish Moscow internationally. The EU has imposed sanctions against Russia for the poisoning.
“If you had wanted to poison the Berlin patient, you would have succeeded”
After weeks of retirement, Russian President Putin introduced himself to the national and international media at his annual press conference. He also mentioned Navalny, whom he only calls the “patient from Berlin.”
Germany had repeatedly asked Russia to solve the crime. Russia, on the other hand, demanded proof that Novichok poisoning had occurred. Navalny also demanded the return of the clothes he had worn on the day he was poisoned and left in Russia. “We washed them too,” the alleged FSB man said by phone when Nawalnys asked about the pants. “It’s clean too, everything is fine.”
The video with the phone call itself was viewed more than half a million times three hours after it was posted. Over and over again, the man gets bogged down in 45-minute conversation, but Navalny, aka Maxim, persists: he only needs “two paragraphs” for a first preliminary report. Do you also call other men? – “Of course”. And don’t you mind talking about those things on the phone? – “But we haven’t talked about anything special.”
