Doctors at the Russian hospital that treated key opposition figure Alexei Navalny have said they've found no traces of poison in his system.
Chief physician at the state-run Omsk hospital, Alexander Murakhovsky, told reporters on Monday that the doctors had received Navalny's results from two labs, one in Moscow and another in Tomsk, which showed that there were “no toxicological substances that could have been described as a poison”.
The results arrived on Friday, the day after Navalny was admitted to the hospital after his Moscow-bound plane had to make an emergency landing in Omsk. The self-styled anti-corruption investigator lost consciousness shortly after boarding the plane in Tomsk.
Murakhovsky said last week that the preliminary diagnosis was that Navalny had suffered “a sudden drop in blood sugar” caused by an unspecified “metabolic disorder”.
Navalny's supporters pressed Omsk doctors to transport him to the Charite hospital in Berlin via the German-based NGO Cinema for Peace. Navalny was flown to Germany on Saturday after Siberian doctors were able to describe his condition as stable.
Though Charite has yet to reveal any details on Navalny's condition, Cinema for Peace founder Jaka Biilj told the tabloid Bild on Sunday: “Navalny will survive the poison attack, but be incapacitated for months as a politician.”
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said the government needs more information about the case before it can confirm or deny allegations of poisoning.
“Many facts are missing in the case of Navalny: medical and also likely criminological,” Maas said on Monday. “We must wait for those (facts).”
