A political foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin is in critical condition after he was poisoned in Moscow last week, according to published reports.
Russian opposition party leader Vladimir Kara-Murza, who suffered a similar fate two years ago, was rushed to a hospital after he ingested a hazardous substance and suffered organ failure, Yahoo News reported Tuesday.
Kara-Murza, 35, was in a coma and hooked up to a ventilator, the website said.
“His condition is critical but stable,” his wife, Yevgeniya Kara-Murza, told Agence France-Presse.
“The official diagnosis is acute poisoning by an unidentified substance,” she said.
Investigators are still attempting to identify the specific type of poison, since initial tests were inconclusive.
In 2015, Kara-Murza fell ill and was diagnosed with acute kidney failure after someone poisoned him with a toxic mixture of heavy metals.
He nearly died in the hospital, but eventually made a full recovery.
He demanded that Russia’s Investigative Committee launch a probe, but the law enforcement agency refused. The perpetrator is still at large.
Kara-Murza was a close confidante of Putin detractor and rival politician Boris Nemtsov, who was shot to death near the Kremlin in 2015.
Until recently, Kara-Murza was deputy chairman of the Parnas liberal party, which is currently headed up by ex-Russian prime minister-turned-Kremlin hater Mikhail Kasyanov. The party is in direct opposition to Putin’s Russian Federation.
Kara-Murza is now the coordinator for the Open Russia foundation of former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who served a 10-year prison stint after blasting Putin publicly.
In 2006, former Putin ally and ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in the United Kingdom with radioactive polonium-210. The 44-year-old died three weeks later in a London hospital.
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