THE jailed Russian billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been slashed in the face by a fellow prisoner while he slept in his dormitory cell.

Khodorkovsky, 42, who was Russia’s richest man — worth £8 billion — before the Kremlin dismantled his oil company Yukos, woke up in his bunk bed to find his face covered in blood. He needed stitches and is now recovering in the hospital wing of the prison camp in Krasnokamensk, Siberia, about 3,000 miles east of Moscow.

The motive for the attack with a shoemaker’s knife was not clear, but Yury Schmidt, his lawyer, warned yesterday: “He is being singled out.”

Last night it was claimed by Natalia Terekhova, another of Khodorkovsky’s lawyers, that a young prisoner named Kuchma had attacked Khodorkovsky to avoid being transferred to another prison barracks. Kuchma is now in an isolation cell, she said.

Sentenced to eight years for tax evasion and fraud, the tycoon, who once lived in a luxurious Moscow villa and travelled by private jet, is now held in a prison dormitory with 100 other men. His barrack block, number eight, is said to house the blatniye, or bandits.

Conditions at the prison are hard. The area is heavily contaminated with radioactive waste and in winter the temperatures drop to -40C.

Khodorkovsky has not had an easy time in jail. He has been disciplined twice — once for receiving illegal documents on prisoners’ rights and once for drinking tea in the wrong part of the jail. His lawyers say the charges are an attempt to stop him obtaining parole by blackening his prison record.

Appeals to move him closer to his family have been refused.

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