AP News, January 30th, 2008
Imprisoned Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky launched a hunger strike Wednesday to protest authorities' refusal to give his jailed ex-lawyer AIDS medication.
Khodorkovsky accused officials of trying to extract incriminating, false confessions from the former lawyer, Vasily Aleksanian, and denying him AIDS treatment until he cooperates.
Aleksanian, who attended preliminary hearings Wednesday in his own trial on charges of embezzlement, money-laundering and tax evasion, has said authorities have refused him essential medicines.
He also accused authorities of deliberately putting him in conditions that exacerbated his illness after he refused to sign false confessions against Khodorkovsky.
Russia's Supreme Court last week rejected Aleksanian's plea for transferral to a civilian hospital.
Khodorkovsky, in a letter posted on his supporters' Web site Wednesday, said Aleksanian's plight left him no choice but to launch a hunger strike.
"I was put before an impossible moral choice: Confess to the crimes I never committed to save his life but break lives of others listed as my "accomplices," or defend my rights ... and become the cause of possible death of my lawyer Aleksanian," Khodorkovsky wrote in a letter to Russia's chief prosecutor.
"I was long thinking about it and I can't make a choice. I'm forced to step outside the procedural frames and inform you about the start of my hunger strike," he said in the letter, which he handed to authorities Tuesday.
Khodorkovsky's lawyer, Yuri Schmidt, said on Ekho Moskvy radio that Khodorkovsky was refusing to take both food and liquids.
Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, was arrested in 2003 on fraud and tax evasion charges that critics called Kremlin revenge for his criticism and apparent political ambitions. He was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to eight years in prison, and his Yukos oil company was eventually transferred to state hands.
