Russian hospital doctor says no poison found in tests on Kremlin critic Navalny

MOSCOW:

The deputy head doctor of a hospital in Siberia said on Friday doctors had found no traces of poison in tests carried out on Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, who was taken ill while flying back to Moscow from Siberia.

In a briefing on Friday, the doctor, Anatoly Kalinichenko, said the hospital already had a full diagnosis of Navalny’s condition, but that he could not disclose it yet.

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was fighting for his life in a Siberian hospital a day earlier after drinking tea that allies said they think was laced with poison.

A fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin, Navalny started feeling ill on a plane returning to Moscow from Tomsk in Siberia on Wednesday morning. He was carried off the plane on a stretcher after it made an emergency landing at Omsk.

Kira Yarmysh, his spokeswoman, said he was in intensive care in a serious but stable condition, and on an artificial lung ventilator in a hospital in Omsk, about 2,200 km (1370 miles) east of Moscow.

“We assume that Alexei was poisoned with something mixed into his tea. It was the only thing that he drank in the morning. Alexei is now unconscious,” Yarmysh said.

Doctors gave contradictory information about his condition, saying it had stabilised and that he was in a coma but also that there was still a threat to his life and they were working to save him.

Navalny’s wife Yulia flew from Moscow to be with him, but Yarmysh said hospital officials had so far prevented her from seeing her husband, citing a lack of patient consent.

There is a long history of Kremlin foes being poisoned or falling ill after suspected poisonings.

They include Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London in 2006 after drinking tea laced with polonium-210, and Sergei Skripal, a former double agent who was poisoned with a nerve agent in 2018 in Salisbury, England.

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied involvement in those and other incidents, calling them anti-Russian provocations.

It said on Thursday that doctors were doing everything they could to help Navalny and wished him a speedy recovery.