Russian top doctor who treated Navalny emerges from forest

Dr Murakhovsky headed the emergency team treating Navalny (pictured in Aug 2020)

The former head of the Russian hospital that treated Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny last year has emerged from a Siberian forest, having been missing.

Teams using a helicopter and drones spent the weekend searching the swampy area in the Omsk region.

Dr Alexander Murakhovsky, 49, left a hunting base on Friday. He turned up in a village on Monday, looking healthy.

His Omsk team gave Navalny life-saving treatment last year, but Navalny's group suspected them of a cover-up.

Navalny, 44, collapsed on a flight in August and was rushed to intensive care in Omsk, then airlifted to Berlin, where he spent months recovering. Western experts concluded that he had been poisoned with Novichok, a Russian military-grade nerve agent.

Dr Murakhovsky reappeared on Monday in Basly, 32km (20 miles) from the hunting base.

His all-terrain vehicle had been found 6.5km from the base in Pospelovo, another village. The Omsk government said the doctor was "in a normal condition" but was undergoing a medical check.

Two senior doctors at the Omsk hospital died aged 55 and 63 this year. There was no indication of foul play.

The hospital, headed by Dr Murakhovsky until last November, insisted that it had found no trace of nerve agent while treating Navalny.

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The Kremlin has repeatedly denied allegations that Russian state agents tried to kill Navalny. Lab tests in three Western countries, confirmed by the global chemical weapons watchdog, established that Novichok had poisoned him.

A Novichok attack also nearly killed Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England, in 2018. A local woman died from the poison.

At the weekend police, an emergencies ministry team and volunteers searched a swampy forest about 2,200km (1,370 miles) east of Moscow for the missing doctor, who is currently health minister for the Omsk region.

Navalny is the most prominent Russian critic of President Vladimir Putin, whom he accused of having ordered the Novichok attack.

Since February Navalny has been in jail in a penal colony, serving a term of nearly three years for an old embezzlement case. He called the conviction fraudulent and politically motivated.

The top medical team at the Omsk hospital which treated Navalny has changed since it was in the world media spotlight last year.

A deputy to Dr Murakhovsky - intensive care specialist Dr Sergei Maximishin - died in February aged 55, from a heart attack.

In March the hospital's traumatology chief, Dr Rustam Agishev, died aged 63. He had had a stroke in December.

Dr Murakhovsky left in November, to head the Omsk regional health service. Another of his deputies, Anatoly Kalinichenko, had resigned in October.