Murakhovsky, then chief physician at Russia’s Omsk Emergency Hospital No. 1, speaks to the media on Aug. 21, 2020.
A doctor who treated Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny last year has disappeared, and two other physicians at the same hospital, one of whom had also treated Navalny, have previously died bizarrely, Russian police said Sunday (May 9).
Omsk local police said the chief physician, Alexander Murakhovsky, who was in charge of treating Navalny, left a hunting camp in the forest in an SUV last Friday (May 7) and has not been heard from since.
Police say rescue teams, drones, a helicopter and volunteers on the ground have joined the search effort.
Omsk regional authorities confirmed that the search operation was difficult due to the complex terrain and the presence of swamps, for which helicopters and drones were also sent, and Murakhovsky’s Land Cruiser was found 6.5 kilometers from the hunting camp, but Murakhovsky was still missing.
In August last year, Navalny was suspected of being poisoned and collapsed on a flight to Moscow. After an emergency landing, Navalny was taken to Omsk emergency hospital No.1 for treatment.
During Navalny’s hospitalization, Murakhovsky repeatedly told the media that Navalny’s main symptom was a sharp drop in blood sugar caused by a metabolic disorder.
After intense international negotiations, Navalny was sent to Germany for further treatment. Subsequently, independent tests conducted by three laboratories in Germany, Sweden and France each indicated that Navalny had been killed by the Soviet-created Novichok nerve agent.
The agent had also been used two years earlier to poison a Russian defector living in Britain. It took five months of life-saving treatment before Navalny finally recovered.
Last November, Murakhovsky was promoted to health minister of the Omsk region, and Navalny had posted a sarcastic social media post at the time saying that this was Murakhovsky’s reward for falsifying the test results.
In fact, in addition to Murakhovsky, Sergey Maximishin, a 55-year-old deputy chief physician at Omsk Emergency Hospital No. 1, who was an authority on Russian anesthesia medicine, also assisted in treating Navalny while he was in a coma. On Feb. 4 of this year, Maximishin was also rumored to have died “suddenly”, but the hospital did not disclose the cause of death.
Rustam Agishev, a 63-year-old doctor at the same hospital, died in March. According to a statement released by the hospital at the time, Agishev suffered a stroke in December last year and was unable to recover, and passed away in March this year.
It is unclear whether Agishev was involved in treating Navalny.
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