Chechnya prime minister in poison riddle
The prime minister of Chechnya Anatoly Popov was flown to a Moscow hospital early today after suffering a serious case of poisoning.
He said he did not know whether he was attacked or suffered food poisoning.
Popov arrived in Moscow shortly after midnight and was taken straight to hospital, Russian news reports said.
An aide to Popov, Alexander Andronov, said doctors considered his condition serious but stable but later Popov told Interfax news agency he was in stable condition and planned to return to Chechnya on Tuesday.
Popov was taken ill in Chechnya on Saturday evening after complaining of pain as his motorcade was returning to the capital Grozny from Gudermes, Chechnya’s second-largest city, following a ceremony celebrating the opening of a new gas pipeline.
“The investigation that is being conducted now will determine whether this was deliberate poisoning or not,” Interfax quoted Popov as saying.
A deputy chief prosecutor in Chechnya, Alexander Nikitin, said the authorities had no information that indicated he was deliberately poisoned.
The ITAR-Tass news agency reported that early evidence suggested that spoiled curd cheese may have been the cause. It was not clear whether anyone else who attended Saturday’s event had become ill.
Officials in Chechnya’s Moscow-backed government are a frequent target for rebels, and tension is running high ahead of Sunday’s presidential election in the war-ravages region. But past attacks have almost exclusively involved guns and explosives.
Popov, 43, was named to the prime minister’s post in February.
