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Toxic agents could have been added to Navalny’s biomaterial outside Russia - intel chief

Such conclusions can be made from the findings of doctors and specialists who worked with Navalny on the territory of Russia, Director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service Sergei Naryshkin said

MOSCOW, August 1. /TASS/. Toxic agents could have been added to Alexei Navalny’s biological samples not on Russian territory, Director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Sergei Naryshkin said on Sunday.

"Yes, there are a lot of inconsistencies in the OPCW [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons] report. In this regard, it is difficult to say whether he was really poisoned already later, after he boarded a plane. But if some markers were, indeed, discovered, then the more realistic presumption is that some substances were added to his biological material," Naryshkin said in a live broadcast of the Solovyov Live YouTube channel whose episodes were shown on the Rossiya-1 TV Channel.

"No, of course not," the intelligence chief said in response to a question about whether this had occurred on the territory of Russia.

Such conclusions can be made from the findings of doctors and specialists who worked with Navalny on the territory of Russia and from the further logic of the events, Naryshkin said.

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said earlier that the OPCW draft report had revealed fatal inconsistencies for the version of events claiming Navalny was poisoned, which the Technical Secretariat was unable to explain to Moscow.

The document indicated that the OPCW Technical Secretariat had deployed a mission for technical assistance related to the suspected "poisoning of a Russian citizen" at Germany’s request on August 20, 2020 - the day of the Navalny incident. The diplomat emphasized that the drafting of Germany’s request to the OPCW had to take a considerable amount of time, as that could not have happened immediately.

German Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Rainer Breul later said that time discrepancies in the OPCW draft report in the part related to the alleged poisoning of Alexey Navalny were due to a mistake in the date, which was corrected in the second version.

Alexey Navalny was rushed to a local hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk on August 20, 2020, 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 2, the German government claimed that he had been affected by a toxic agent belonging to the Novichok family. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov pointed out that no poisonous substances had been detected in Navalny’s system prior to his transfer to Berlin.