Prominent anti-Kremlin activist Pyotr Verzilov late on Saturday arrived in Berlin on a special medical transport flight after falling ill and being hospitalized in Moscow last week, German newspaper Bild reported on Saturday.
Members of the punk band Pussy Riot, with whom Verzilov collaborated, have suggested he might have been poisoned.
Bild said the activist would be transferred to an unnamed Berlin clinic for treatment, and quoted family members as saying he had lost his sight, his ability to speak and his ability to walk.
“I believe that he was poisoned intentionally and that it was an attempt to intimidate him or kill him,” his wife, Nadeschda Verzilov, who was waiting for her husband at Berlin’s Schoenefeld Airport, told the newspaper.
Verzilov, 30, in July staged a brief pitch invasion during the soccer FIFA World Cup final in Moscow along with three women affiliated with the anti-Kremlin punk band. They served 15-day jail terms for the protest.
Their protest of what they described as the excessive powers of Russia’s police briefly disrupted the match with a very large broadcast audience.
Verzilov is the publisher of Mediazona, a Russian online news outlet that focuses on human rights violations in Russia’s penal system.
Several Kremlin opponents have died from poisoning or suspected poisoning over the past 15 years.
Alexander Litvinenko, a former member of Russia’s domestic security service, succumbed slowly in London after ingesting a radioactive isotope in 2006. He fell ill hours after meeting with two Russians whom Britain claimed were the assassins.
Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, became sick after drinking tea on an Aeroflot flight in 2004.
She was traveling to southern Russia to try to help negotiate the Beslan crisis, in which Chechen militants took hundreds of schoolchildren hostage. Poison was mentioned as a possible cause of her symptoms.
Politkovskaya survived and was shot to death in the elevator of her apartment building two years later.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
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Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
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