MOSCOW. Jan 18 (Interfax) - There are no grounds to open a criminal case over the possible poisoning of opposition activist Alexei Navalny, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.
"As we have found nothing to indicate poisoning with warfare agents in Navalny's tests, we have no grounds, according to our laws, to open a criminal case," Lavrov said at the annual press conference in Moscow on Monday.
"The doctors in Omsk who saved him [Navalny] and practically pulled him out of a coma, they asked his wife to sign the relevant consent and shared their conclusions and analysis results with German doctors, who acknowledged the receipt of those conclusions in writing," the minister said. However, "Charite doctors found nothing because this is a civilian clinic, and the samples were handed over to the Bundeswehr clinic, which detected the traces of a warfare agent," he said.
"It was possible to settle the case a long time ago" if Germany had shared the information with Russia, Lavrov said. "The Germans refused under the pretext of the problem being multilateral instead of bilateral and directed us to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)," he said.
Moscow invited OPCW representatives to bring Navalny's bio-material samples to Russia so that OPCW and Russian doctors could conduct joint research and "build mutual confidence," Lavrov said.
"The only condition is that we do this together because we openly told them we had no trust in them after certain episodes of the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria and the reports released by the [OPCW] Secretariat," Lavrov said.
Moscow relied on Ronald Reagan's paraphrased "don't take it on trust" principle, Lavrov said. "We want to rely on the principle 'we have no trust in you, so we prefer to verify'," he said.
The OPCW kept avoiding giving a direct answer for a long time and insisted that Russia send Navalny's samples straight to the organization, Lavrov said. "No, that won't happen. The relationship will no longer work one way. There will be no trust in the Bundeswehr clinic or the French, Swedish or other clinic the OPCW chooses for its purposes until we make sure that these people are honest scientists," Lavrov said.