Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny in ICU after ‘poisoning’
MOSCOW: The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was in intensive care in a Siberian hospital Thursday a er 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 a er he lost consciousness on a flight to Moscow and his plane made an emergency landing.
His spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh wrote on Twi er 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’.
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 Twi er.
The head of the legal department of the AntiCorruption Foundation that Navalny heads, Vyacheslav Gimadi, wrote on Twi er that “there is no doubt that Navalny was poisoned for his political position and activity.” — AFP