MOSCOW, Jan 30, 2008 (AFP) - Jailed Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky has gone on hunger strike to protest poor treatment provided to a fellow inmate and former associate who is suffering from AIDS, his lawyer said Wednesday.
"I have been forced to go beyond the procedural framework and inform you of the start of a hunger strike," Khodorkovsky said in a written appeal read on the Echo of Moscow radio station by his lawyer Yury Shmidt.
In the appeal, Khodorkovsky urged Russia's prosecutor general to "guarantee the life" of Vasily Aleksanyan, a former colleague who supporters say is in a critical condition in a Moscow prison due to inadequate treatment.
Aleksanyan was the vice president of the Yukos oil firm, then Russia's largest, which Khodorkovsky headed before his conviction in 2005 for massive fraud and tax evasion in a trial that Kremlin critics said was politically motivated.
In his appeal, Khodorkovsky suggested that treatment had been withheld as a means of putting pressure on him to confess to crimes he did not commit.
"I have been faced with an impossible moral choice: to admit to crimes that never happened and thus save a person's life, but destroy the fate of innocent people who would be held as my accomplices," Khodorkovsky's said in the appeal.
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