Wife and aide visit comatose Russian dissident in Berlin hospital after airlift

ALEXEI NAVALNY’S wife and a top aide have visited him in a Berlin hospital where the comatose Russian dissident is being treated by German doctors after a suspected poisoning.

Mr Navalny was flown to Germany on Saturday from Siberia after doctors determined he was stable enough to be brought to the capital’s Charité hospital for treatment.

After his arrival, hospital spokeswoman Manuela Zingl said the 44-year-old would be undergoing extensive diagnostic tests and that doctors would not comment on his illness or treatment until they were able to evaluate the results.

Yesterday, Mr Navalny’s wife Yulia Navalnaya and aide Leonid Volkov visited the Russian opposition leader in the hospital, making no comments to reporters as they entered the building.

Mr Navalny, a politician and corruption 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 last Thursday.

His supporters believe that tea he drank was laced with poison and that Kremlin officials are behind both his illness and a delay in transferring him for treatment to Germany.

Mr Navalny fell ill on a flight back to Moscow from Siberia on Thursday and was taken to hospital after the plane made an emergency landing.

While his supporters and family members insist that Mr Navalny was poisoned, doctors in Omsk have denied that, theorising a metabolic disorder was the most likely diagnosis and that a drop in blood sugar may have caused him to lose consciousness.

Russian health authorities on Saturday said that tests done so far have not shown any poisons in his system.

When German specialists arrived aboard a plane equipped with advanced medical equipment on Friday morning at his family’s behest, Mr Navalny’s physicians in Omsk initially said he was too unstable to move.