MOSCOW, September 19. /TASS/. A pre-investigation check into the hospitalization of Russian blogger Alexei Navalny will not be limited to 30 days, a law enforcement source told TASS.
"The check into Navalny’s hospitalization will not be completed on September 20. It will continue until a procedural decision is made to launch or not to launch criminal proceedings," the source said.
According to the source, no reasons to launch a criminal case have been established so far.
The pre-investigation check into Navalny’s hospitalization began on August 20. It is being conducted by the Siberian Federal District’s Transport Police Department. So far, officers established the timeline and route of Navalny’s stay in the Tomsk and the Tomsk Region, identified the people he met and places where he stayed. Officers talked to 5 out of 6 six individuals who accompanied Navalny on his journey. They displayed no signs of poisoning with prohibited or toxic substances.
The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office sent two appeals over the Navalny incident to Germany on August 27 and September 14. So far, both of them have been left unanswered. Besides, Russian prosecutors sent similar requests to France and Sweden on September 18.
Navalny incident
On August 20, a plane carrying Navalny made an emergency landing in the Russian city of Omsk after the blogger had suddenly felt unwell in mid-flight. Navalny was taken to the hospital in a coma and was hooked up to a ventilator. On August 22, he was flown to Germany for treatment at Berlin’s Charite hospital. Charite medics said on September 7 Navalny had been taken out of the medically-induced coma and was being disconnected from the ventilator.
The German government said on September 2, citing the results of a toxicological analysis carried out by Bundeswehr experts, that Navalny had been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that Moscow was ready to fully cooperate with Berlin. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, in turn, noted that Germany had failed to provide any evidence of poisoning.