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Russian diplomat urges Germany to publish video of OPCW taking samples from Navalny

Inconsistencies in the report of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on the incident with Russian blogger Alexey Navalny confirm that the incident was an orchestrated provocation, Zakharova said earlier

MOSCOW, July 24. /TASS/. Germany should publish a video showing how samples were taken from Russian blogger Alexey Navalny by specialists of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the Russian Foreign Ministry’s official spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said in a statement on Friday.

"This provocation, apparently concocted in haste by the Euro-Atlantic ‘community’ is so thinly veiled, that, upon a closer view, any reasonable person will have numerous questions about what really happened to Alexey Navalny. In the current situation, we would suggest that our German colleagues, for example, show to the international community a video footage, which was supposed to be taken by OPCW specialists when they were taking biological samples from Alexey Navalny in the Charite hospital, when they subsequently separated samples and sealed them for being sent to two laboratories, appointed by the OPCW technical secretariat to carry out the research," Zakharova said.

"Exactly this format of procedures is envisaged by the Chemical Weapons Convention and its annex on verification, which must be fully observed. Without this evidence, it would be very hard to believe that the ‘poisoning’ of Alexey Navalny has really taken place," she said.

Inconsistencies in the report of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on the incident with Russian blogger Alexey Navalny confirm that the incident was an orchestrated provocation, Zakharova said on Thursday.

The report mentioned that the OPCW Technical Secretariat had deployed a technical assistance mission 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 said that time discrepancies in the OPCW draft report in the part related to the alleged poisoning of blogger 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 the blogger 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.