Russian Agent 'Tricked into Detailing Navalny Assassination Bid'
Mr. Navalny is recovering after weeks in intensive care.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny duped a Russian FSB state agent into revealing details of an attack on him with the nerve agent Novichok, the investigative group Bellingcat reports.
Mr. Navalny reportedly impersonated a security official to call the agent.
The agent, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, told him the Novichok had been placed in a pair of Mr. Navalny's underpants.
Mr. Navalny, who is still recovering in Berlin, posted
a recording of the long conversation on his YouTube channel.
He collapsed aboard a Russian airliner in August in the attack, which nearly proved fatal.
As part of Mr. Navalny's ruse to elicit more details of the assassination attempt,
Bellingcat says the call to Mr. Kudryavtsev was set up to indicate it was coming from a Federal Security Service (FSB) landline.
In the conversation, Mr. Navalny posed as a senior official seeking details for a report on the FSB operation.
Mr. Kudryavtsev told him the swift response of the airline pilot and the emergency medical team in Omsk, Siberia - where Mr. Navalny was first treated - could have been the reason for the failure to kill him.
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Two hours that saved Russian opposition leader's life.
Mr. Kudryavtsev said he had been sent to Omsk later to seize Mr. Navalny's clothes and remove all traces of Novichok from them.
There has been no comment from the Russian authorities.
Last week President Vladimir Putin told a huge TV audience that the Bellingcat investigation - carried out with other Western media partners - was a "trick" invented by US intelligence.
But he added that it was right for the FSB to be shadowing Mr. Navalny.
The Bellingcat report last week named several FSB agents - chemical weapons specialists - who, it alleged, had been tailing him for years before the attempt on his life.
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Report names 'Russian agents' in Navalny poisoning.
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Putin calls Navalny poisoning inquiry 'a trick'.
Mr. Navalny has millions of followers on social media, where he denounces Mr. Putin's United Russia party as deeply corrupt and full of "crooks and thieves". He says Mr. Putin runs a "feudal" system of patronage "sucking the blood out of Russia".
In the summer, before the August poisoning, Mr. Navalny campaigned to get several of his supporters elected to councils in Siberia.
Source: bbc.com
Website:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55395683
Date: December 21, 2020