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Navalny’s Team Says Novichok Found on ‘Holy Spring’ Water Bottles at His Siberian Hotel

It was previously believed that the Putin critic fell ill after drinking a poisoned cup of tea at a Siberian airport.

It was initially believed that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny fell ill after drinking a poisoned cup of tea at a Siberian airport. But the Putin critic’s associates now say that Novichok—the deadly nerve agent proven to have caused Navalny’s hospitalization—has been discovered on water bottles that were left in his hotel room before he departed for the airport and fell ill on a domestic flight. A video posted on Navalny’s Instagram showed his team searching the room at the Xander Hotel in Tomsk just one hour after they learned he’d fallen sick last month. The post said a snap decision was taken to gather everything up because “fact that the case would not be investigated in Russia was quite obvious.” The footage showed the team bagging up several empty bottles of “Holy Spring” water, and the post said a German lab found traces of the poison on the bottles.