BERLIN, September 28. /TASS/. German Chancellor Angela Merkel did visit Russian blogger Alexey Navalny at Berlin’s Charite hospital last week, German Government Spokesman Steffen Seibert said at a briefing on Monday.
"Yes, I can confirm it," he said in response to a TASS request.
According to Seibert, it wasn’t a secret visit but rather a private one, and, in his words, the cabinet does not announce Merkel’s private meetings. "It was the chancellor’s private meeting with Navalny. It was not a secret one in any way but it wasn’t open to the public," Seibert said, refusing to provide any details. At the same time, the German cabinet spokesman said that Berlin did not have any new information on the Navalny incident.
Der Spiegel wrote earlier that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had visited Navalny when he was undergoing treatment at the Charite hospital. According to the news outlet, the visit proves that the German chancellor is unwilling to soft-pedal the Navalny case and will continue probing into the circumstances of the incident that happened to him.
Navalny case
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 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.
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia was 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. Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the German Foreign Office had not provided the Russian ambassador with any proof of its version of the incident.