Investigators Collected Snow, Underwear and More From Scene of Navalny’s Death – Dossier Center

Russian investigators seized 75 items, including snow and underwear, from the scene of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s death, the investigative news outlet Dossier Center reported Friday, citing documents it said it had obtained.

Navalny died in an Arctic penal colony on Feb. 16 under murky circumstances, leading his allies to assert that he was murdered. His widow Yulia Navalnaya revealed this summer that investigators informed her there were no signs of foul play in his death.

The Insider, another independent investigative outlet, said last week it had obtained “hundreds” of documents suggesting that investigators had redacted the report they shared with Yulia Navalnaya. Navalny’s doctor suggested that this unredacted version described symptoms that may indicate poisoning.

The Insider’s report contained a one-page list of items collected from the scene of Navalny’s death, including “samples of vomit” for examination. 

Dossier Center published additional pages of what it said was the list of collected items, which included 11 tubes containing snow from the prison yard where Navalny felt ill, his underwear and other clothes.

In total, the list contained 75 collected items that were categorized as “examined,” “sent for examination” and unmarked. 

The Moscow Times could not independently verify the authenticity of the list, which also included four video recorders and one hard drive.

“The full list of seized items suggests that not a single thing that Navalny had touched was left in the [prison] colony,” Dossier said, adding that it did not have access to the results of the examinations.

Dossier’s report documents the times when Navalny went for a walk (12:10 p.m.), soon after which he “laid on the floor and began complaining of sharp pain in the abdominal area” before experiencing convulsions, vomiting and losing consciousness.

The prison doctor examined him at 12:43 p.m. and tried to resuscitate him at 1:10 p.m. before an ambulance arrived at 1:36 p.m. Navalny was pronounced dead at 2:17 p.m.

Dossier said investigators made several changes to the report in which they declined to launch a criminal investigation into Navalny’s death since signing the original document on March 18.

The outlet said Navalny’s family received the sixth — and least detailed — version of the investigators’ report in July.

Following the Dossier Center's report, Navalny ally Georgy Alburov called on journalists to refrain from publishing information they obtained about Navalny's death, saying that doing so may jeopardize an ongoing independent investigation by prompting the security services to cover their tracks.

“In the first days after the poisoning, a media outlet published a street camera video from the Yamal-Nenets autonomous district [the region where Navalny's prison was located], to which we also had access. This led to all the archives being deleted from the servers, and access being blocked. An absolutely similar story is happening right now with the documents published the other day,” Alburov said.

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