05, 2018 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny addresses
supporters during an unauthorized anti-Putin rally in Moscow, two
days ahead of Vladimir Putin’s inauguration for a fourth Kremlin
term. Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP
The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was in
intensive care in a Siberian hospital on Thursday after he fell ill
in what his spokeswoman said was a suspected
poisoning.
Navalny, a 44-year-old lawyer and anti-corruption campaigner who
is among President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critics, was being
treated in a hospital in the city of Omsk after he lost
consciousness on a flight to Moscow and his plane made an emergency
landing.
His spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh wrote on Twitter that Navalny had
been placed in a coma on a ventilator and that tests were being
carried out.
“Alexei has toxic poisoning,” she wrote. “Alexei is now in
intensive care.”
“I’m sure it was intentional poisoning,” she told the Echo of
Moscow radio station.
State news agency TASS reported that Navalny was in the
intensive care unit for toxicology patients in Omsk Emergency
Hospital No. 1.
“He is in a serious condition,” the hospital’s chief doctor
Alexander Murakhovsky told TASS.
The hospital’s deputy head Antoly Kalinichenko told journalists:
“He is on a ventilator, his condition is stable.”
He said a diagnosis should be established Thursday but that
doctors have “no confidence as of today that the reason for his
condition is poisoning”.
‘Something in his tea’
Yarmysh said that police and investigators had arrived and
questioned a doctor.
“We think that Alexei was poisoned with something mixed in his
tea. That was the only thing he drank in the morning,” she wrote on
Twitter.
January 16, 2018 Navalny smiles during an interview with AFP at the
office of his Anti-corruption Foundation (FBK) in Moscow. Mladen
ANTONOV / AFP
The head of the legal department of the Anti-Corruption
Foundation that Navalny heads, Vyacheslav Gimadi, wrote on Twitter
that “there is no doubt that Navalny was poisoned for his political
position and activity.”
He said Navalny’s lawyers were requesting an investigation into
the attempted assassination of a public figure.
Navalny has previously suffered physical attacks, and a number
of Kremlin critics have been poisoned in the past.
He endured chemical burns to his eye in 2017 when attackers
threw green dye used as a disinfectant at his face outside his
office.
In August last year Navalny suffered rashes and his face became
swollen while he was in a police detention centre serving a short
term for calling for illegal protests.
‘Quickly lost consciousness’
He was taken to hospital where doctors said he had suffered an
allergic reaction but Navalny asked for an investigation into
poisoning.
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“He was poisoned in the police detention centre. I’m sure that
now the same thing happened. It’s different symptoms, evidently a
different drug,” Yarmysh told Echo of Moscow.
She told the radio station that she met Navalny to go to the
airport in the Siberian city of Tomsk on Thursday morning when he
seemed “absolutely fine”.
July 20, 2019 Navalny speaks with journalists during a rally to
support opposition and independent candidates after authorities
refused to register them for September elections to the Moscow City
Duma, Moscow. Maxim ZMEYEV / AFP
“He only drank black tea in the airport,” she said.
“Straight after takeoff he quite quickly lost
consciousness.”
A witness posted a photo on social media of Navalny drinking
from a paper cup at an airport cafe.
The REN TV channel posted a video shot from the plane of him
being wheeled on a stretcher into an ambulance.
High-profile poisonings
Navalny, a charismatic lawyer and whistleblower, is travelling
the country to promote a tactical voting strategy to oppose
pro-Putin candidates in more than 30 regional elections in
September.
He has been the target of multiple criminal probes, while his
Anti-Corruption Foundation is regularly raided by police and
investigators.
He has served numerous terms in police cells for organising
illegal protests.
Yarmysh said they had been on a work trip to Tomsk.
Former US ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul tweeted: “Praying
@navalny will be ok.”
The incident involving the highest-profile opposition figure in
Russia follows other poisonings of Kremlin critics in and outside
the country.
Britain named two Russian military intelligence agents as
suspects after Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter
Yulia were poisoned with nerve agent Novichok in the city of
Salisbury in March 2018.
In 2006, former Russian security service agent Alexander
Litvinenko was fatally poisoned with radioactive polonium in a cup
of tea in London. Russia refused to extradite chief suspect Andrei
Lugovoi, who became a nationalist MP.
Several other opposition figures have suffered severe illnesses
in Russia that they blamed on poisoning.
AFP
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