MOSCOW: Russia announced on Thursday it had launched a police “check” into opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s illness and asked German medics treating him to share his medical records while the Kremlin continued to insist there were no grounds for a criminal probe.
The German doctors have said tests on the 44-year-old politician and anti-corruption campaigner indicate that he was poisoned, and his allies have pointed the finger of blame at President Vladimir Putin. In an interview on state-controlled television on Thursday, Putin made no mention of the case.
Prosecutors said they had “no evidence” of a deliberate crime committed against Navalny and requested that German medics hand over “the evidence for the initial diagnoses they gave” including test results.
SUSPECTED NERVE AGENT
Navalny fell ill on a plane to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk. He spent two days in a Russian clinic in a coma before being transferred to Berlin’s Charite hospital.
Medics there said on Monday they do not know the exact substance involved but that Navalny was apparently poisoned with a substance that inhibits the cholinesterase enzyme, a feature of nerve agents.
Navalny’s allies say he may have been poisoned by a cup of tea he drank at Tomsk airport.
International calls have been mounting for an independent probe into the case, but Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Thursday dismissed the police check as routine, saying: “there is no basis for an investigation”.
“Nothing has changed, we still don’t have any understanding of what caused the state the sick man is now in,” he told journalists.
Transport police in Siberia said they had started “a pre-investigation check” into what led to Navalny’s hospitalisation in the Siberian city of Omsk to establish “all the circumstances” and decide whether to open a criminal probe.
The police action appears to be a low-level response after Navalny’s allies asked for an investigation into an attempted assassination of a public figure.
Police do such checks to determine whether a crime has been committed.
Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh tweeted that they had not been informed of the police check. — AFP
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