According to TASS, citing a law enforcement source, Alexey Navalny was suspected of having allegedly called for a violent change of the constitutional order in Russia during the radio broadcast on April 27 in the U-turn program on Ekho Moskvy.
“In connection with these statements, on November 30, a check was started for signs of public calls for extremist activity (part 2 of Art. 280 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation)”, - the message says.
Why investigators became interested in Navalny's April radio broadcast only at the end of November, the news agency does not specify.
Earlier it was reported that on August 20, Navalny was urgently hospitalized with suspicion of poisoning with an unknown substance. Subsequently, the toxicologists of the Bundeswehr, as well as experts from several European laboratories, having studied the analyzes of Navalny, came to the conclusion that Navalny had been poisoned with a military nerve poison of the Novichok type. Doctors of Russian state clinics did not agree with the conclusions of their European colleagues. They claim that the reason for Navalny's sudden coma was "metabolic disorders".
Representatives of 56 states that are parties to the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons called on Russia to investigate the incident with the attempt on Navalny's life and to punish those responsible for the use of a chemical warfare agent against the opposition politician. However, a criminal case into the attempted murder of Navalny has not yet been initiated even more than three months after the incident.
Against this background, the message of the "source" about a new test of Navalny for extremism is very similar to a signal from unnamed security officials that after an unsuccessful attempt at poisoning with chemical weapons, Navalny, who survived the assassination attempt and is undergoing rehabilitation in Europe, "should not" return to his homeland.
According to Navalny, they want to start a criminal case against him precisely so that he does not return to Russia after his recovery.
“Putin, sitting in his bunker, does not want me to return to Russia after being cured, that he threatens to jail me for treason (I betrayed her that I did not die when I was poisoned on the orders of Bunkerny Ded), he decided to add criminal case for extremism. <…> Dear Vladimir Putin, to whom this post will be brought printed on a piece of paper: I don't care about your threats. I do not care about your investigators and judges, whom you have long turned into your shameless lackeys, standing guard over your chests of money, "Navalny wrote on Instagram.
He said that he considers not his words, spoken on the air of Ekho Moskvy, extremism, but how Putin is behaving in an attempt to hold on to power.
As clarifies Dozhd, the speech in the program "U-turn" on April 27 was about Navalny's "5 steps" program, in which he offered to pay all citizens of Russia 20 thousand rubles each. When Navalny was asked what he would answer to the opinion that the authorities would not specifically support people in order not to fulfill his program, Navalny retorted:
“I've heard this opinion. But you know, if our government is such that, in order not to do something nice for me, they want to leave 60 million people hungry, - such a government should definitely be overthrown right now, quite possibly even violently".