Russia: Court confirms refusal to investigate Navalny poisoning

A Moscow military court on Monday dismissed a complaint filed by Alexei Navalny, who is serving a prison sentence. Researchers have accused Siberia of “inaction” in refusing to launch an investigation into the poisoning last year.

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A spokesman for the 235th Military Garrison Court in Moscow told AFP that the request of a leading Kremlin critic currently serving a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence had been rejected.

Mr. Navalny did not attend the trial and refused to attend by videoconference from the Pokrov prison camp, 100 kilometers east of Moscow.

Opponents allege that Russian investigators did not begin an investigation into his poisoning on August 20 in Tomsk.

Mr. Navalny, a victim of a substance identified by European laboratories as a Soviet-era military neurosurgeon Novichok, spent several weeks in a coma in Russia and later in Germany, returning from there shortly before his arrest in January.

He was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison in a fraud case from 2014 that was denounced as a policy that was targeted by several other legal actions.

He accused the Russian security services, the FSB, of being behind the poisoning, as ordered by the Kremlin.

After Mr. Navalny was admitted to the hospital, Russian police began a “preliminary examination” in August, examining the places where he had passed and questioning witnesses.

However, she ruled that there was no evidence that a “crime” had been committed. And Russian analyzes did not reveal any toxic substance in his body.

Russia has always disregarded Western calls for an investigation and predicted that Mr. Navalny would not be poisoned, nor would it question foreign intelligence services or even the rival life of the opposition.