The condition of Chechnya's prime minister worsened Tuesday and a member of his security service said he had been poisoned, the Interfax news agency reported just a day after the chief doctor at Moscow's most prestigious hospital said there were no signs that deliberate poisoning caused the official to fall ill over the weekend.

Anatoly Popov's temperature rose sharply, bringing a group of doctors to his bedside at the Central Clinical Hospital to monitor his condition, Interfax reported, citing an unidentified source close to Popov. The agency quoted a security aide, also unidentified, as saying ``there is no doubt that he was poisoned.''

Popov was hospitalized in Chechnya on Saturday evening after complaining of pain following a ceremony celebrating the official opening of a new gas pipeline. His illness raised concerns that he might have been poisoned.

He was flown to Moscow early Monday, but later in the day said he was feeling better and would return to Chechnya on Tuesday. The chief doctor at the Central Clinical Hospital, Alexander Nikolayev, said there was no evidence of deliberate poisoning.

``His diagnosis is a toxic infection from food. There are no signs of deliberate food poisoning,'' Interfax quoted Nikolayev as saying Monday. He said Popov's condition was improving and that all signs of the illness would be gone in two to three days.

But on Tuesday, the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted a spokesman for the Moscow-backed government in Chechnya, Alexei Vasin, as saying doctors insisted that Popov should remain in the hospital for at least three days. Vasin said Popov was running a temperature of 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) overnight.

Officials in Chechnya's Moscow-backed government are a frequent target for rebels, and tension is running high ahead of Sunday's presidential election in the war-ravaged region. But past rebel attacks have almost exclusively involved guns and explosives.

Popov, 43, was named to the prime minister's post in February. He is temporarily serving as Chechnya's acting president while his boss, Akhmad Kadyrov, is running in the war-ravaged region's Oct. 5 presidential election.

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