Novichok traces found on water bottle in Alexei Navalny's hotel room, his colleagues say

Colleagues of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny say that a bottle of water with a trace of the Novichok nerve agent was found in his hotel room after his poisoning.

Navalny fell ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20 and was later flown to Germany, where he was kept in an induced coma for more than two weeks and treated with an antidote.

On Tuesday, he posted a picture of himself from his hospital bed in Berlin, the first time we have seen Navalny since he was taken ill.

A video posted on Navalny’s Instagram on Thursday showed his team collecting items from his hotel room in Tomsk an hour after learning that he had become ill.

Team members can be seen packing items into plastic bags and inspecting water bottles.

Our team in #TheCube - Euronews' social media newsdesk - investigated this video and were able to verify the time to be around 11:45 am when this particular video was taken. They were able to locate the hotel as Xander Hotel, Tomsk. They also confirmed one of the figures within the video to be a local lawyer.

A German military lab has determined that Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, the same class of Soviet-era agent that Britain said was used on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, in 2018.

On Monday, the German government said independent tests by labs in France and Sweden backed up its findings.

The Hague-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is also taking steps to have samples from Navalny tested at its designated labs, Germany has said.

The Kremlin has bristled at calls from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders to answer questions about the poisoning, denying any official involvement.