MOSCOW (Reuters) - Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said on Thursday that being woken up by a guard every hour during the night amounted to torture and that his appeal for treatment for acute back and leg pain had been refused in a deliberate attempt to run him down.
Navalny, one of President Vladimir Putin's most prominent critics, made the allegations in two official appeals to the authorities which he passed to his lawyers who visited him at the IK-2 corrective penal colony 100 km (60 miles) east of Moscow.