Suspected poisoning victim undergoes tests
BERLIN — Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, in a coma after a suspected poisoning, was flown from Siberia on Saturday to Berlin for treatment by specialists at the German capital’s main hospital.
After touching down shortly before 9 a.m. 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 Charité hospital.
“He survived the flight and he’s stable,” Jaka Bizilj, of the German organization Cinema For Peace, which organized the flight, told The Associated Press.
The hospital later issued a statement saying extensive tests were being carried out on Navalny, and doctors would not comment on his illness or treatment until those were completed.
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 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 him to Germany.
The Omsk regional health ministry on Saturday issued a statement saying that, so far, tests done on Navalny while he was there had found no poisons.
“Tests were immediately taken for the presence of toxic substances in the body,” the ministry said. “Already today we can say that oxybutyrates, barbiturates, strychnine, convulsive or synthetic poisons have not been found. Alcohol and caffeine were found in the urine.”
Bizilj, a film producer, said he was not qualified to say how Navalny fell ill, but that “it’s obvious that something terrible happened.”
“He’s a healthy strong man with a good constitution — the night before the attack he was swimming in a river,” Bizilj said.
“Obviously this was an attack on his life... a healthy man suddenly was in life danger and maybe could have died and maybe he can still die.”
When German specialists arrived aboard a plane equipped with advanced medical equipment Friday morning at his family’s behest, Navalny’s physicians in Omsk initially said he was too unstable to move.
Navalny’s supporters denounced that as a ploy by authorities to stall until any poison in his system would no longer be traceable. The Omsk medical team relented only after a charity that had organized the medevac plane revealed that the German doctors examined the politician and said he was fit to be transported.
Deputy chief doctor of the Omsk hospital Anatoly Kalinichenko then told reporters that Navalny’s condition had stabilized and that physicians “didn’t mind” transferring the politician, given that his relatives were willing “to take on the risks.”
The Kremlin denied that resistance to the transfer was political, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying that it was purely a medical decision. However, the reversal came as international pressure on Russia’s leadership mounted.
It would not be the first time an outspoken Russian was targeted in such a way — or the first time the Kremlin was accused. Thursday, leaders of France and Germany said they were ready to offer Navalny and his family assistance and insisted on an investigation.