Alexei Navalny’s aides say ‘nerve agent’ found in bottle in hotel room

Traces of the nerve agent allegedly used to poison Russian politician Alexei Navalny were found in a bottle in the hotel room where he stayed before falling ill, his team said.

Navalny collapsed from a flight in Siberia in August. Germany says he was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.

Previously it was thought that it could have been a target of the airport.

“Now we understand: it was done before he left his room to get to the airport,” says a post on his Instagram account.

Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition figure and one of the main critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is receiving treatment in the German capital, Berlin.

His team alleges that he was poisoned on Putin’s orders.

The Kremlin denies any involvement in the case, saying its doctors found no evidence that a nerve agent was used.

The case has caused a diplomatic rift between Berlin and Moscow. The European Parliament passed a non-binding resolution on Thursday urging the EU to call for an international investigation into the poisoning.

Video posted to Navalny’s Instagram account shows members of his team in a hotel room in the Siberian city of Tomsk after news of his poisoning emerged.

The post says they were there to collect possible evidence from the hotel to send to Navalny’s medical team in Germany because they did not trust the Russian authorities.

In the clip you can see several empty water bottles. They are among a number of items bagged by people with gloves.

“It is precisely on the bottle in the Tomsk hotel room that a German laboratory found traces of Novichok,” the publication says.

Russian news site Proyekt quoted one of Novichok’s creators, Vladimir Uglev, as saying that the poison was unlikely to have been in the water as the fact that Navalny survived suggests that he only had skin contact with it.

German authorities have not commented on the alleged find.

Earlier this week, Navalny posted once for the first time since he became ill. He said he could now breathe without help.

The Russian anti-corruption activist fell ill during the flight from Tomsk to Moscow on August 20, and the plane made an emergency landing in the city of Omsk. Russian officials were persuaded to allow him to be flown to Germany two days later.

After conducting the tests, Germany said there was “unequivocal evidence” that Navalny had been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.

Laboratories in Sweden and France later confirmed the findings, according to the German government.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said Thursday that it would also conduct tests at the request of Germany.

A nerve agent from the Novichok group was also used to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, in 2018. They both survived, but a local woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after coming into contact with the poison. .

Britain accused Russia’s military intelligence of carrying out that attack. Twenty countries expelled more than 100 Russian diplomats and spies in response. Moscow denied any involvement.