(22 Aug 2020) Film producer Jaka Bizilj, who organised the flight to bring Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny to Germany for medical treatment, said on Saturday the politician was in a stable but critical condition.
Navalny, who is in a coma after a suspected poisoning, arrived in Berlin earlier on Saturday on a medical evacuation flight from the Siberian city of Omsk.
After touching down shortly before 9am at a special area of the capital's Tegel airport used for government and military flights, Navalny was taken by ambulance to the downtown campus of Berlin's Charite hospital.
The hospital later issued a statement saying extensive tests were being carried out on Navalny, and doctors would not comment on his illness or treatment until those were completed.
Speaking outside the hospital, Bizilj dismissed Russian doctors' suggestions that Navalny had fallen ill from some kind of natural cause.
"He's a healthy, strong man with a good constitution," he said. "The night before the attack or whatever you want to call it, he was swimming a river."
Navalny, a politician and corruption investigator who is one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's fiercest critics, was admitted to an intensive care unit in the Siberian city of Omsk on Thursday after falling ill on a flight.
His supporters believe that tea he drank was laced with poison — and that the Kremlin is behind both his illness and the delay in transferring him to a top German hospital.
When German specialists arrived aboard a plane equipped with advanced medical equipment on Friday morning at his family's behest, Navalny's physicians in Omsk initially said he was too unstable to move.
Navalny's supporters denounced that as a ploy by authorities to stall until any poison in his system would no longer be traceable.
The Omsk medical team relented only after a Cinema For Peace charity that organised the medevac plane revealed that the German doctors examined the politician and said he was fit to be transported.
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