The Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok was found on a water bottle in the Siberian hotel room where Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny stayed, shifting the timeline for his poisoning, Reuters reported.
Navalny became violently ill on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow, and original speculation was that the poison was mixed in a cup of tea he had in an airport lounge prior to boarding his flight.
Navalny was transferred to a German hotel after Russian officials refused to acknowledge that he had been poisoned using the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok, which had been used to poison other opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As soon as they learned that Navalny had fallen ill on the flight, members of Navalny’s team collected items from his room in the Xander Hotel in Tomsk so that Russian police could not destroy evidence.
“It was decided to gather up everything that could even hypothetically be useful and hand it to the doctors in Germany. The fact that the case would not be investigated in Russia was quite obvious,” the Navalny team posted on Instagram.
German labs have confirmed Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, which was confirmed by other European laboratories. The presence of Novichok on the water bottle was also verified by German labs.