Russian opposition activist and Putin critic Alexei Navalny hospitalized after being 'poisoned with a toxin,' his press secretary says
Aug 20, 2020, 15:36 IST
- The Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny was hospitalized Thursday, according to local reports, with one of his aides saying he'd been "poisoned by a toxin."
- Navalny's press secretary, Kira Yarmish, tweeted that he was aboard a plane returning to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk when he started "feeling ill." The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, and Navalny was taken to a hospital in an ambulance.
- "We assume that Alexei was poisoned with something mixed into his tea," Yarmish wrote in a follow-up tweet. "That was the only thing he drank this morning. The doctors say that the toxin was absorbed more quickly because of the hot liquid. Right now Alexei is unconscious."
- Navalny previously suffered an allergic reaction in which his eyes and face turned red and swelled up while he was being held in prison in July of last year. The cause of that reaction was unclear, but some suggested the open critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin had been poisoned.
- "A year ago, when Alexei was in a detention center, he was poisoned," Yarmish tweeted, recalling the July 2019 incident. "Obviously, now they've done the same thing to him again."
- Last October, the Kremlin named Navalny's nonprofit group, Foundation for Fighting Corruption, as a foreign agent in an attempt to cripple the organization.
- By being named as a "foreign agent," the group was subjected to regular "audits." Amid street protests against Moscow's city elections last summer, more than 200 police raids occurred at the nonprofit's offices, The Washington Post reported at the time.
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