#Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was ‘screaming in pain’ from suspected poisoning

Images have emerged of Russian opposition party leader Alexei Navalny sipping tea at an airport before falling ill from suspected poisoning.

Navalny, 44, felt sick on his flight back to Moscow from Tomsk, a city in Siberia, and was rushed to a hospital after the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk on Wednesday, his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said on Twitter.

“He is in a coma in grave condition,” she wrote.

The Vladimir Putin foe – who also is seen motionless in a video being moved on a gurney from the aircraft to an ambulance – was in a coma and on an artificial lung ventilator, Yarmysh said, according to Reuters.

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

“Doctors said that the toxin was absorbed more quickly through hot liquid,” she added.

One passenger aboard his flight posted an account on social media of what he witnessed.

“At the start of the flight he went to the toilet and didn’t come back. He started feeling really sick. They struggled to bring him round and he was screaming in pain,” Pavel Lebedev wrote.

Max Seddon, the Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, shared an image that he said shows Navalny drinking the tea at the Tomsk airport.

The manager of the cafe told the Interfax news agency that he would launch an investigation, The Moscow Times reported.

S7, the airline Navalny flew on, said he began feeling very ill soon after takeoff and that captain decided to make an emergency landing. He had not eaten or drunk anything on board, it added.

Anatoliy Kalinichenko, deputy chief doctor of the hospital where Navalny is being treated, told reporters that he was in grave, yet stable condition.

Doctors are considering a variety of diagnoses, including poisoning, said Kalinichenko, who refused to elaborate, citing a law preventing doctors from disclosing confidential patient information.

Dr. Anastasiya Vasiliyeva, Navalny’s personal physician, wrote on Twitter that the hospital was refusing to communicate with her, the Moscow Times reported. She said she was on her way to Omsk.

State news agency Tass reported that authorities were not considering deliberate poisoning, citing an anonymous source in law enforcement who said “it is not unlikely that he drank or consumed something yesterday himself.”

Yarmysh bristled at that suggestion.

“Of course. It’s just the tea was bad. This is what the state propaganda is going to do now — yell that there was no deliberate poisoning, he (did something) accidentally, he (did something) himself,” she said in a tweet.

Navalny was returning to Moscow after touring Siberia in support of independent candidates running in local elections next month, according to The Moscow Times.

On Wednesday, he posted a photo on Instagram from Tomsk with the caption: “Crooks won’t kick themselves out of the city parliament!”

The longtime Kremlin critic has faced pressure for his activism before.

While serving a 30-day jail sentence last summer for calling on people to attend an anti-government protest, he suffered an acute allergic reaction, which as least one doctor said he may have been due to poisoning.

In 2017, an activist threw a chemical at him that left him partially blind in one eye, the Moscow Times reported.

Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption has been exposing graft among government officials, including some at top levels.

Last month, he had to shut the foundation after a financially devastating lawsuit from Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman with close ties to the Kremlin.

With Post wires