Alexei Navalny, the leading Russian anti-corruption activist and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, was expected to be “poisoned with a toxin” and was taken to hospital in an unconscious state on Wednesday night, according to his press secretary.
‘In the morning, Navalny was back from Tomsk to Moscow. On the flight he began to get sick. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk. Alexei is poisoned with a toxin. “Right now we are in an ambulance on our way to the hospital,” tweeted press secretary Kira Yarmish, who later said her boss was in the ICU.
“We assume that Alexei was poisoned with something that mixed in his tea. That was the only thing he drank this morning. The doctors said that the toxin was absorbed faster because of the hot liquid. At the moment Alexei is unconscious, “she added.
“A year ago, when Alexei was in a detention center, he was poisoned. Of course, they did the same thing to him now. ”
Last July, during one of Navalny’s incarceration sentences, he fell ill – and asked questions about whether he had been poisoned.
A prison employee told the wife of the opposition leader, who had arrived for a visit, that an ambulance had rushed him to the hospital with “a kind of severe allergic reaction”, which made his eyes and face red. and swelling.
“We are very worried about Alexei, it could be one chemical that was injected into his cell or on his bed,” Yarmish told The Daily Beast at the time.
In October, the Kremlin appointed the non-profit group set up by Navalny, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, as a foreign agent – a movement seen as an attempt to thwart its activities. That was just weeks after police special forces raided the group’s offices and seized computers and other items.
Navalny, who has been imprisoned dozens of times over the past decade, filmed video of his lawyers playing cool football in the office, cementing his reputation of nerves-of-steel.
“We are scared and unstoppable, no matter how hard the pressure from Putin’s thugish government is,” Navalny told The Daily Beast earlier this year.
The alleged poisoning comes just weeks after Navalny leveled allegations of corruption against Svetlana Radionova, a Kremlin environmentalist, citing documents linking her to luxury real estate in Moscow and Nice. “Such wealth cannot be explained. It’s so scandalous, “Navalny said in a YouTube report, which was viewed by more than 3 million people.
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