Russia: Chechnya's acting president was seriously ill yesterday after being poisoned, in what officials called a possible assassination attempt a week before a controversial election to find a leader for the restive region, writes Daniel McLaughlin, in Moscow
Mr Anatoly Popov, who is also Chechnya's prime minister, was rushed to hospital on Saturday night, and doctors were considering evacuating him to Moscow from the southern Russian republic, where Kremlin troops are fighting their second war in a decade with separatist guerrillas.
"The diagnosis is poisoning by a substance of unknown origin," the Chechen government's press service said of Mr Popov, who is a vocal supporter of a Kremlin-designed peace plan that rebels have rejected as a sham.
Mr Popov fell ill as he returned from a ceremony to mark the opening of a new gas pipeline in the town of Gudermes.
Chechen officials told Russian news agencies that Mr Popov's food may have been poisoned in Gudermes, and that investigators had not ruled out the possibility that he was the victim of a plot to kill him.
Mr Popov is acting as Chechen leader while his boss, Akhmad Kadyrov, campaigns to become the region's president in a poll scheduled for next Sunday. Mr Kadyrov said yesterday that Mr Popov's condition was improving, and that there were no immediate plans to airlift him out of Chechnya.
A former guerrilla leader, Mr Kadyrov is now the Kremlin-backed candidate in an election race that has seen all his potentially serious rivals sidelined. Some have fallen foul of campaign technicalities, others have withdrawn complaining of pressure from Moscow, while one accepted a job offer from the Kremlin.
The rebels have called the election a farce.