According to AP reports, former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar was released from a hospital in Moscow Monday evening following a mysterious illness that raised suspicions of another poisoning after a former KGB agent died in London from ingesting a radioactive substance.Gaidar, a 50-year-old economist and leader of a Russian liberal opposition party, fell ill at a conference outside Dublin, Ireland a day after former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko died in London from poisoning by the radioactive element polonium-210.

Irish doctors who treated Gaidar initially at a Dublin hospital concluded he was not poisoned by a radioactive substance but they said his health had suffered sudden “radical changes.” Last week, Gaidar returned to Moscow and was hospitalized there.

Doctors could give a final diagnosis of what struck the Gaidar as early as Tuesday morning, Gaidar’s spokesman Valery Natarov told The Associated Press.

Gaidar, who served briefly as prime minister in the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin, began vomiting and fainted during a conference in Ireland on Nov. 24. He was rushed into intensive care at a Dublin hospital.

The illness added to growing speculation in Moscow over Litvinenko’s death and who might be responsible. Litvinenko was an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and on his deathbed, he blamed Putin for his poisoning.

Some critics have tied both Litvinenko’s death and Gaidar’s illness to the October killing of Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, also a Kremlin critic. Russia has denied involvement in Litvinenko’s death.

Gaidar, a liberal economist whose criticism of the Kremlin was largely limited to economic issues, served in post-Soviet Russia’s most liberal and democratically oriented government. He is unpopular among many Russians who blame the liberal, Western-backed economic policies he pursued as prime minister for the decline in their living standards following the Soviet collapse.

Gaidar’s aides initially said doctors treating him in Moscow suspected he had been poisoned and were working to determine how that might have happened. A top official with Gaidar’s party, the Union of Right Forces, told Interfax on Monday that he believed Gaidar had been poisoned.

“They really tried to poison him, possibly in an attempt to discredit the authorities. There might have been other goals, but I am not ready yet to give preference to any,” Nikita Belykh was quoted as saying.

“I’d rather not do any guesswork, but as far as I know, they really tried to poison him, especially if we view the situation in the light of the Politkovskaya and Litvinenko incidents,” he said.

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