Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said Russia should return the clothes he was wearing on the day he fell into a coma as evidence that he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok.
Two independent laboratories, one in Sweden and one in France, as well as a lab run by Germany’s armed forces, have confirmed that traces of the nerve agent were found “in and on” his body, Navalny wrote in a blog post published Monday.
“I am now interested in one thing: my clothes. Namely, the clothes I was wearing on the day of poisoning, August 20,” he wrote, adding that “thirty days of ‘pre-investigation’ were used to hide the important evidence.”
Navalny said that before he was allowed to be taken to Germany, where he is recovering in a Berlin hospital, all his clothes were removed. As the nerve agent was found on his body, his clothes “are a very important thing,” he wrote. “The thirty days of pre-investigatory inspection have expired. I demand that my clothes are carefully packed in a cellophane bag and returned to me.”
Navalny, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, fell ill on a flight to Moscow on August 20 and was taken to a hospital in Siberia before being transferred to Berlin two days later, where he awoke from his coma earlier this month.
The incident has marred relations between Russia and Germany and the EU, with Berlin repeatedly calling on Moscow to “explain what happened.”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg condemned the attack on Navalny in a speech at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Brussels on Monday.
“It was not just an attack on one individual but on fundamental democratic rights,” and it “demands a strong international response,” he said.