MOSCOW (Reuters) – Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, who fell seriously ill on Thursday after what his allies thought was poisoning, had been under intense police surveillance in previous days.
PHILO PHOTO: Medical specialists bring Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on a stretcher in an ambulance on his way to an airport before his medical evacuation to Germany in Omsk, Russia August 22, 2020. REUTERS / Alexey Malgavko
Before crashing on a flight during a trip to Siberia, Navalny was followed by place-named FSB officers and his movements were closely monitored via CCTV, the report in the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets said.
Navalny, a longtime opponent of President Vladimir Putin and champion of anti-corruption, was flown in an air ambulance for treatment in Germany on Saturday.
Navalny, 44, was in a coma when he was evacuated from the Siberian city of Omsk, but no word has yet been received from the Charite hospital in Berlin about his condition.
His team had to host a briefing via YouTube on Sunday night to discuss “everything we know so far about Alexei’s poisoning”, but later canceled it and said they were not ready, wrote press secretary Kira Yarmysh and campaign HQ chief Leonid Volkov on Twitter.
Citing security services sources, the Moskovsky Komsomolets described the timeline of his trip before falling ill due to the number of rooms his team booked in a local hotel and the fact that Navalny chose not to sleep in the room that under his name was booked.
An apartment rented to him by one of his supporters was discovered by police surveillance, the paper reported, when a sushi takeaway was ordered to the address by one of Navalny’s supporters.
“The extent of the oversight does not surprise me at all, we were already aware of it,” Yarmysh wrote on Twitter.
“What is surprising, however, is that (sources for security services) are not ashamed to describe it.”
In its report, the Moskovsky cited Komsomolets paper as security sources and said that its oversight of Navalny’s movements did not reveal any suspicious contacts that could be related to his illness.
Security services believe that if Navalny was poisoned, the incident took place at the airport or on the plane, the newspaper wrote.
However, the paper said they were still waiting for results of laboratory tests of samples made by police from all places Navalny and his team visited on their trip, including air samples.
Initial results are expected Monday, with results from tests for radioactive material due later in the week, the paper said. It did not say if these would be made public.
Doctors at the hospital in Omsk where Navalny was treated before his evacuation to Germany have said they do not believe he was poisoned. They diagnosed him with a metabolic disease that may have been caused by low blood sugar.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that it was not yet clear what caused Navalny to become ill. He had previously said that any poisoning had to be confirmed by laboratory tests and that doctors did everything possible to help Navalny.
Written by Polina Ivanova; Edited by Frances Kerry
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