MOSCOW, September 11. /TASS/. The Secretariat of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has confirmed that it received no materials from Germany about the condition of Russian opposition blogger Alexei Navalny, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the OPCW Alexander Shulgin said on Friday.
"They confirmed once again that the secretariat had received from Germany neither sample test results nor any other materials concerning this case until now, i.e. Friday’s evening," he said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 television channel.
In this connection, Shulgin drew attention to Der Spiegel’s publication alleging that an OPCW delegation had visited Berlin’s Charite clinic and had received Navalny’s sample tests.
"The OPCW told us that traditionally the secretariat does not comment on media publications," the Russian diplomat stressed.
The German side said earlier it had handed over Navalny’s test results to the OPCW. However, the Russian mission to the organization said on Thursday these reports were not true.
Navalny case
Navalny felt sick on August 20 while flying from Tomsk to Moscow and the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk. The man was taken to hospital in a state of coma and was connected to a ventilator. He was airlifted to the Berlin-based Charite clinic in the morning on August 22. Its doctors said that indicators of poisoning had been found in his body.
Charite medics said on September 7 Navalny had been taken out of the medically-induced coma and was being disconnected from the ventilator.
Last week, the German government said that German military toxicologists had found that Navalny had been exposed to a nerve agent of the Novichok family. Following this, Berlin and its Western partners demanded Moscow clarify the circumstances of the incident and warned they would look at possible sanctions against Moscow.
The Russian side stresses that it is interested in a thorough investigation of the incident but has not yet received any reply from Germany to its inquiry. Apart from that, Moscow points to the fact that no toxic agent had been spotted in Navalny’s samples before he was taken to Germany whereas the latter has given no evidence to back its theory.