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Woman from Navalny’s team across Siberia evaded questioning, police say

The police said that the remaining five people, who had accompanied the blogger, were questioned

MOSCOW, September 11. /TASS/. One of the six people accompanying blogger Alexei Navalny on his trip to Siberia avoided being questioned by police about the incident with the blogger and left Russia, so her whereabouts are being traced, the investigative branch of the Russian Interior Ministry’s Transport Police Department for the Siberian Federal District said on Friday.

"Along with this, Marina Pevchikh, a woman from Navalny’s group, who permanently resides in the United Kingdom, refrained from explanations on August 20. The investigation believes that on August 22, the above mentioned individual boarded a flight to Germany, due to which it was impossible to take her statement. Her whereabouts are being established," the statement reads.

The police said that the remaining five people, who were with Navalny, were questioned. They are Vladlen Los, Georgy Alburov, Ilya Pakhomov, Kira Yarmysh and Pavel Zelensky.

Moreover, police reconstructed the timeline of the blogger and his team's stay in Tomsk and the Tomsk Region and traced their itinerary, social contacts and the sites where they had either stayed or called in.

Navalny case

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

Last week, the German government claimed that having examined Navalny’s test samples the Bundeswehr’s toxicologists had come to a conclusion that the blogger had been affected by a toxic agent of the Novichok family. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia stayed ready for comprehensive cooperation with Germany. He pointed out that no poisonous substances had been detected in Navalny’s system prior to his transfer to Berlin.

The Russian Foreign Ministry stated that Moscow was still waiting for a reply from Germany to the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office’s request. The ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said that the German Foreign Office had not provided the Russian ambassador with any proof of its version of the incident.