Prominent Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin’s critic, Alexei Navalny, was reportedly being closely watched by the authorities ahead of what his supporters say was a life-threatening poisoning earlier this week.
“The extent of the surveillance does not surprise me at all, we were already aware of it,’’ Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said on Twitter on Sunday.
“But it is astonishing that they did not hesitate to tell everyone about it,’’ she added.
Yarmysh’s comments came in response to a report by the Moscow tabloid, Moskovsky Komsomolets, detailing Navalny’s movements in the days before he was taken seriously ill and slipped into a coma on Thursday.
Citing unnamed security officials, who admitted they had been following Navalny, the report lists where Navalny and his team stayed, whom he spoke with and even what they ate during a trip through Siberia.
Navalny, who is still fighting for his life, was taken ill on a flight to Moscow on Thursday and flown to Germany on Saturday for emergency treatment at Berlin’s Charite hospital.
His team says he was poisoned in Siberia.
Russian doctors have said he could be suffering from a metabolic disorder.
The article claims that given the level of surveillance Navalny was under, he could only have been poisoned at the airport or on the plane.
Navalny’s staff said they would make a statement on Sunday at 1600 GMT on their internet channel.
“We will tell everything that is currently known about Alexei’s poisoning,’’ Yarmysh said on Twitter.
“We will now tell how everything really was.’’
(dpa/NAN)
