Kremlin critic stable after being flown to Germany

BERLIN: Russian dissident Alexei navalny, who is in a coma after a suspected poisoning, arrived in Berlin on a special flight for treatment by specialists at the German capital’s main hospital.

“Navalny is in Berlin,” Jaka Bizilj, of the German organisation Cinema For Peace, which organized the flight, said yesterday. “He survived the flight and he’s stable.”

After touching down in the morning at a special area of the capital’s Tegel airport used for government and military flights, Navalny was taken by ambulance to the downtown campus of Berlin’s Charite hospital.

The hospital later issued a statement saying extensive tests were being carried out on Navalny, and that doctors would not comment on his illness or treatment until those were completed.

Navalny, a 44-year-old politician and graft investigator who is one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critics, was admitted to an intensive care unit in the Siberian city of Omsk on Thursday.

His supporters believe that tea he drank was laced with poison – and that the Kremlin is behind both his illness and the delay in transferring Navalny to a top German hospital.

He was allowed to be transported to Germany only after much wrangling that his supporters denounced as a ploy by authorities to stall until any poison in his system would be no longer traceable.

Navalny was flown in to Berlin on a plane organised by supporters that was equipped with advanced medical equipment and accompanied by German medical specialists. —AP