Russia: court validates refusal to investigate Navalny poisoning

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A Moscow military court on Monday rejected a complaint by jailed opponent Alexei Navalny, who accused investigators of “inaction” who refused to open an investigation after his poisoning in Siberia last year.

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A spokeswoman for the 235th Military Garrison Court in Moscow confirmed to AFP that the request of the main Kremlin critic, who is currently serving a two-and-a-half-year prison camp sentence, had been rejected.

Mr. Navalny was not present at the hearing and refused to take part by videoconference from the Pokrov prison camp, 100 km east of Moscow, where he is being held.

The opponent accuses Russian investigators of not having opened an investigation into his poisoning in Tomsk on August 20.

Victim of a substance identified by European laboratories as being Novichok, a military nerve agent developed during the Soviet era, Mr. Navalny spent several weeks in a coma in Russia and then Germany, from where he returned in January before being immediately arrested.

Sentenced to two and a half years in prison for a fraud case dating from 2014 that he denounces as a policy, he is targeted by multiple other legal proceedings.

He accused the Russian security services, the FSB, of being behind his poisoning, on the orders of the Kremlin.

The Russian police had launched in August a “preliminary examination” after the hospitalization of Mr. Navalny by inspecting the places where he had passed and questioning witnesses.

However, she ruled that there was no evidence that a “crime” had been committed. And no Russian analysis has revealed, according to the authorities, any toxic substance in his body.

Russia has always brushed aside Western calls for an investigation, estimating according to the versions that Mr. Navalny was not poisoned, questioning foreign secret services or even the hygiene of life of the opponent.