Berlin: Russia’s opposition leader Alexei Navalny, in a statement released on Thursday, accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of being behind the attack by giving him poison. Navalny’s supporters have often said that such attacks can only happen if ordered at the top level.
The Kremlin has consistently denied any involvement in it. Navalny, a politician, corruption investigator, and most vocal critic of Putin, went to Germany on August 20 for treatment two days after falling ill in a domestic flight to Russia. He spent 32 days in the hospital, 24 of them in the intensive care unit. He has posted his comments online.
In his first interview after the incident, he told Der Spiegel magazine in Germany, “Putin was behind the attack.” In a brief excerpt of an interview held in Berlin on Wednesday, he said, “I have no other information about how the crime was committed.”
The full interview will be published online later on Thursday. Navalny had been in a coma for two days after falling ill in a hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk.
Before he was taken to Berlin for treatment, Russian doctors said that no trace of poison was found in his body. German chemical weapons experts confirmed that he had been poisone
