Russia wants to send investigators to Germany to look into Navalny’s poisoning case
Russia, which previously said it had "no reason to investigate" Navalny’s poisoning will ask Berlin to allow its specialists to be present during Navalny's questioning.
The Transport Directorate of the Russian Interior Ministry will send a request to Germany about the possibility to participate in the investigation into the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the press service of the Russian Interior Ministry said.
"Investigation unit is preparing an additional request for legal assistance by the German authorities. This will include a request for the possibility of the presence during investigative actions with Navalny of the Russian Internal Affairs investigators, who are looking into this fact, as well doctors and experts with the possibility to ask clarifying and additional questions," the statement reads.
The day before, Russia's ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, said at a meeting of the UN Security Council that Russia has no grounds to launch an investigation into the incident with the Russian Opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
"We have no grounds to start an investigation. Our doctors, who, by the way, saved Alexei Navalny, found no traces of chemical weapons in his tests. We have not received any evidence from Germany that would allow us to conclude that this is a deliberate crime," Nebenzya said.
Earlier, the German authorities informed the G7 countries that Alexei Navalny had been poisoned by a new and more powerful variant of the nerve agent Novichok compared to the one used against Sergey and Yulia Skripal. The German authorities are confident that the nerve agent of this type could be created only in the state laboratory. German experts were able to find traces of Novichok not only in Navalny’s body, but also on the bottle from which he drank. According to German investigators, if the bottle had not been brought to Germany, it would have been much more difficult to identify a specific type of poison, and it was this missed detail that became the biggest failure of the Russian special services.