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Navalny's Team: Water Bottle with Poison Traces Found in Hotel Room

RFE/RL's Russian Service

   Associates of Alexei Navalny say traces of the nerve agent used to
   poison the Russian opposition politician were found on a water bottle
   in the hotel room he was staying in in the Russian city of Tomsk.

   Navalny, 44, felt unwell while on a plane on his way from Tomsk to
   Moscow in late August, forcing the airliner to make an emergency
   landing in the city of Omsk, where he was rushed to a hospital. He was
   later flown to the Charite clinic in Berlin, Germany, where toxicology
   tests provided "unequivocal evidence" that the gravely ill
   Kremlin-critic had been poisoned with a nerve agent from the Soviet-era
   Novichok chemical group.

   Navalny's blog on Instagram said on September 17 that his associates
   were still in the Xander hotel in Tomsk when news of the politician's
   illness broke. They immediately rushed to Navalny's vacated and
   yet-to-be-cleaned room, where they collected any suspicious items they
   saw, including an opened bottle of mineral water with the brand name
   that translates as "Holy Spring."

   The Proekt website on September 17 quoted one of Navalny's associates
   who said that the bottle was taken to Berlin by one of Navalny's team
   members, Maria Pevchikh, who is a resident of the United Kingdom.
   The Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
   (OPCW) said on September 17 that it is providing technical assistance
   to Germany in investigating Navalny's case of poisoning with the nerve
   agent.

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