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Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Monday released a recording of a phone call he said he made to an alleged state security operative, who revealed some details of how the politician was supposedly poisoned and media identified as a member of a team that has reportedly trailed Navalny for years.
The man in the recording indicated that he was involved in cleaning up Navalny’s clothes “so that there wouldn’t be any traces” after Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s top critic fell into a coma while on a domestic flight over Siberia. During the recorded call, the man said that if the plane hadn’t made an emergency landing, “the situation would have turned out differently.”
The man, who was named in a news report last week as an operative from Russia’s FSB domestic security agency, pointed to Navalny’s underwear as a place where the substance that poisoned the politician may have been planted.
Navalny fell sick during the Aug. 20 flight in Russia and was flown to Berlin while still in a coma for treatment two days later. Labs in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established that he was exposed to a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent.
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Russian authorities have vehemently denied any involvement in the poisoning.
Last week, the investigative group Bellingcat released a report alleging that operatives from Russia’s FSB domestic security agency followed Navalny during his trips since 2017, had “specialized training in chemical weapons, chemistry and medicine,” and some of them were “in the vicinity” of Navalny in the timeframe “during which he was poisoned”.
The investigation, conducted by Bellingcat and Russian news outlet The Insider in cooperation with CNN and German news outlet Der Spiegel, identified the supposed FSB operatives after analyzing telephone metadata and flight information.
Read more: yahoo
