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LONDON: The trial of Soviet-era dissident Vladimir Bukovsky on charges of making and possessing thousands of indecent images of children was suspended Wednesday afer he was admitted to hospital with pneumonia.
Bukovsky’s lawyer, Francis FitzGibbon, told Cambridge Crown Court the defendant could not attend the rest of the trial after being diagnosed by his doctor Tuesday with “bronchial pneumonia.”
The 73-year-old, who has appeared at his trial in a wheelchair, is receiving treatment for the condition at a hospital in Cambridge, eastern England, the lawyer said.
“The oxygen in his blood is low and the word from the hospital is he will be unfit to attend until the end of January,” FitzGibbon added.
Bukovsky, an author and activist who has been exiled from Russia since 1976 and now lives in Britain, is accused of accessing thousands of indecent images of children over a 15-year period.
He spent 12 years in Soviet prisons, forced-labor camps and psychiatric hospitals and was one of the first to detail the use of such places by the former Soviet Union to punish political prisoners.
He was arrested by British police in 2014 and charged with five counts of making indecent images of children, five of possessing indecent images of children and one of possessing a prohibited image of a child. He denies them all.