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Khodorkovsky Ends 2-Day Hunger Strike

Jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky ended a two-day hunger strike on Wednesday after the Kremlin confirmed complaints about his detention had been passed on to President Dmitry Medvedev.

Khodorkovsky said a decision last week to extend his stay at a pretrial detention facility during his second trial violated a law signed by Medvedev earlier this year and demanded that the president be informed.

"The aim of my appeal has been achieved. I have ended my hunger strike," Khodorkovsky said in a statement posted on his web site, Khodorkovsky.ru.

Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, was arrested in 2003 after falling foul of then-President Vladimir Putin and is serving an eight-year sentence for tax evasion after a trial his supporters dismissed as a farce.

Khodorkovsky was moved last year from his eastern Siberian prison colony to the detention facility in Moscow to attend a second trial on charges of theft and money laundering, which could add 22 years to his sentence.

Last week, the judge approved an extension of his detention at the Moscow facility for three months, a move Khodorkovsky says directly contradicts a law passed by Medvedev barring the pretrial jailing of suspects in economic crimes.

Khodorkovsky faces tougher conditions at the detention facility than he would at a normal prison, with less access to his family and less time out of his cell, his spokesman Maxim Dbar said.

But Khodorkovsky said he started the hunger strike to prevent his case from becoming a precedent that would weaken Medvedev's law. His aim was to "reduce opportunities for arbitrariness and corruption," the statement said.

Judge Viktor Danilkin on Wednesday rejected a request by Khodorkovsky's lawyers that he stand down over the decision to extend his detention, Dbar said.

The judge accepted a request by Khodorkovsky's lawyers to allow German Gref, minister for economic development and trade under Putin from 2000 to 2007, to be questioned as a witness, Dbar said.

Gref, now chief executive of state-controlled bank Sberbank, would be the most senior official to be questioned, but the judge declined to force Gref to attend the trial, Dbar said.

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