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Russian leader's illness linked to spy's death

Vladimir Radyuhin

Reform architect may be victim of poisoning

MOSCOW: Russia's former acting Prime Minister Egor Gaidar is suffering from a mystery illness which his friends link to the equally mysterious death of ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko last week.

Mr. Gaidar, architect of Russia's shock pro-market reforms in the early 1990s, was in a Moscow hospital since Sunday after coming close to death with a mystery ailment during a visit to Ireland, his family said. "On November 24 my father lost consciousness for three hours and was rushed to an intensive care unit in a Dublin hospital," Mr. Gaidar's daughter, Maria, said on Wednesday. "It was a question of life and death, and doctors are still at a loss as to what happened to him."

She wound not comment on a report in London's Financial Times that Mr. Gaidar may have been poisoned.

Mr. Gaidar fell ill a day after Litvinenko died in a London hospital from what is believed to be poisoning with the radioactive isotope polonium-210.

Head of Russia's national electricity company Anatoly Chubais suggested that his close friend and colleague Mr. Gaidar was poisoned and linked the incident to Litvinenko's death and the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot dead last month in Moscow.

"For me there is no doubt that the deathly chain Politkovskaya-Litvinenko-Gaidar, which miraculously was not finished, would have been extremely attractive for the supporters of an unconstitutional, forceful change of power in Russia," said Mr. Chubais.

Mr. Chubais was apparently referring to a popular theory among Russian liberal politicians that the deaths of Politkovskaya and Litvinenko were the work of anti-democratic forces in the Kremlin seeking to provoke a political crisis in Russia in the run-up to presidential elections in 2008 and persuade President Vladimir Putin to nominate an autocratic successor.

However, the mainstream theory in Moscow is that the recent high-profile murders were engineered by exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky in order to compromise President Putin, his sworn enemy, and undermine Moscow's efforts to get Mr. Berezovsky extradited to Russia. Russia and Britain signed a bilateral extradition pact earlier this month.

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