Russia announces preliminary probe into opposition leader Navalny’s illness

Russian police announce a preliminary probe into the circumstances of the sudden illness of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who fell into a coma last week following a suspected poisoning and amid growing pressure from Western officials to investigate.

According to a statement by a Siberian branch of Russia’s Interior Ministry, investigators in Siberia have been working on “establishing all the circumstances of the incident,” conducting forensic studies and collecting items “that may have probative value.”

Navalny, an opposition politician and corruption investigator who is one of President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critics, fell ill on a flight back to Moscow from Siberia last Thursday and was taken to a hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk after the plane made an emergency landing.

In this photo taken on February 29, 2020, Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny takes part in a march in memory of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in Moscow, Russia (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin)

Over the weekend, he was transferred to the Charité hospital in Berlin, where doctors found indications of “cholinesterase inhibitors” in his system. But the hospital in the German capital hasn’t yet identified a specific substance.

His allies insist he was deliberately poisoned and say the Kremlin was behind it, accusations that officials denounced as “empty noise.”

— AP