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Russia sends fifth request to Germany over Navalny incident

The previous four requests did not receive a substantive reply, according to the Prosecutor General’s Office spokesman

MOSCOW, November 6. /TASS/. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office has sent the fifth request to Germany over the incident with Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny due to the lack of response to the four previous requests, Russian Prosecutor General’s Office Spokesman Andrei Ivanov told reporters on Friday.

From August 27 to September 28, 2020, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office sent four requests to Germany on legal aid on the materials of inquiry led by the Russian Interior Ministry into the hospitalization of Navalny from the Tomsk-Moscow plane. "Not a single question posed by the Russian side earlier has received a detailed explanation," Ivanov said.

He added that "judging by the nature of this response, it can be stated that so far, the requests made by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office remain unfulfilled." The spokesman informed that Russia had sent to Germany the necessary explanations of the Russian law and the information on the procedures held in Russia. "At the same time, information on the chemical and its components that was allegedly found in Germany has been requested once again from the German competent bodies," he added.

The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office added that the Russian law enforcement cannot make conclusions on the circumstances of Navalny’s hospitalization, as "no poisoning agents have been found as a result of expert tests held on Russian territory." Ivanov stressed that the lack of response to Russia’s requests for legal aid is "lamentable," as it takes away the opportunity for Russian competent agencies to find out the circumstances of the incident.

Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny was rushed to a local hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk on August 20 after collapsing on a Moscow-bound flight from Tomsk. He fell into a coma and was put on a ventilator in an intensive care unit. On August 22, he was airlifted to Berlin and admitted to the Charite hospital. On September 22, Navalny was discharged from the hospital.

On September 2, Berlin claimed that having examined Navalny’s test samples, German government toxicologists had come to the conclusion that the blogger had been affected by a toxic agent belonging to the Novichok family. According to Germany, these findings were confirmed by laboratories in France and Sweden.