A LAWYER who has championed some of the Kremlin's most virulent critics has claimed she fell ill after finding a mercury-like substance in her car, raising suspicions of politically motivated poisoning.
Karina Moskalenko was too sick to appear in court on Wednesday for pretrial hearings into the killing of outspoken journalist Anna Politkovskaya. The human-rights lawyer is representing the family of the reporter gunned down two years ago.
Ms Moskalenko told news agencies this week she and her family suffered headaches, dizziness and nausea and were tentatively diagnosed with poisoning after she and her husband discovered mercury in their car in Strasbourg. French police are investigating.
"People do not put mercury in your car to improve your health," Ms Moskalenko told Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy.
Ms Moskalenko's colleagues were quick to point to political motives. They disagreed, however, over which case might have got her into the crosshairs of would-be assassins. Ms Moskalenko is a lawyer in several cases that have irked and embarrassed Russian authorities - and poisoning is an increasingly familiar fate among the foes of Russia's powerful.
"I have no doubt it is a political crime. They tried to kill her," said Lev Ponomaryov, a leader of the For Human Rights movement. In a phone interview, he linked the suspected poisoning to Ms Moskalenko's work presenting the case of jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
"Moskalenko is active and smart, and she has every chance to win it," he said. "That is what the Russian authorities must be afraid of."
Politkovskaya, a fiery Kremlin critic known for her unflinching accounts of human-rights abuses committed by Russian forces in Chechnya, was shot dead in the doorway of her Moscow apartment house.
She previously had suffered a mysterious sickness after drinking tea on a flight to southern Russia.
The questions of who carried out and who ordered the hit on Politkovskaya remain unanswered. Three men are about to stand trial - one is a former Moscow police officer. The three have been charged with knowledge of or involvement in the killing. The gunman is at large, and the mastermind is unknown.
In Khodorkovsky, Ms Moskalenko represents a client who clashed publicly with Vladimir Putin and was jailed on charges of tax evasion and fraud. Khodorkovsky, founder of Yukos oil, is still imprisoned in provincial Russia. Last week, he was disciplined after Esquire published his letters.
Ms Moskalenko has also defended former chess champion and leading Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov. - (LA Times-Washington Post service)