In a video posted on Twitter, she pledged to “keep up” her husband’s struggle. “They’re lying, waiting for the traces of yet another Novichok of Putin’s to go away.” “They’re now hiding his body, refusing to show it to his mother, refusing to hand it over,” Ms Navalnaya said. He returned to certain imprisonment in Russia the same year. The Putin critic had been poisoned with the nerve agent in 2020, and was flown to Germany for treatment. However, Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s widow, claimed that the body had been kept away from his family to allow traces of Novichok to disappear. Reporters said no autopsy had yet been performed on the Russian opposition leader, whom prison authorities claimed had died of “sudden death syndrome”. “The person convulses, they try to restrain him, and bruises appear…They still tried to resuscitate him, and he died, most likely, from cardiac arrest,” they said. Navalny’s bruised body was eventually found at a hospital morgue two days after his death.Ī Russian paramedic told the Novaya Gazeta newspaper that the marks on his chest and head were seemingly caused during attempts to revive him. “It’s obvious that the killers want to cover their tracks and are therefore not handing over Alexei’s body, hiding it even from his mother,” Navalny’s team said. Russian media reported that another local state laboratory had denied holding Navalny’s body, prompting concern over its whereabouts. Lyudmila Navalnaya, his mother, travelled to the only morgue in Salekhard, a town near to where her son was imprisoned, but was told it was closed when she arrived.Ī lawyer who accompanied her later said he had telephoned the morgue but was told that they did not have Navalny’s remains. Navalny’s family have been unable to see the Russian opposition leader’s body, which went missing for several days until it was located in an Arctic morgue. Widow claims death was Novichok poisoning Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokesman, said: “The immediate reaction of Nato leaders to Navalny’s death in the form of direct accusations against Russia was self-exposing.” Reuters said the 71-year-old former KGB spy was shown smiling while meeting workers at a factory in Chelyabinsk, in the Ural mountains. The Kremlin said Putin had been informed. If this is true, then not ‘Navalny died’, but ‘Putin killed Navalny’ and only that. His long-time chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, wrote on Twitter: “We have no reason to believe state propaganda. It said it was investigating his “sudden death”.įor some time his supporters and family declined to believe the news, pointing out there had been earlier such reports that proved false. The Russian prison service said Navalny “felt unwell after a walk” and “almost immediately” lost consciousness. The ambulance team reached the prison in less than seven minutes, and doctors reached the patient two minutes later.” “They carried them out for more than half an hour. “The doctors who arrived at the scene continued the resuscitation measures that the prison’s doctors had already provided,” RIA quoted an official as saying.
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His death was announced by Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service, which said the 47-year-old lost consciousness on Friday after taking a walk in the prison where he was moved last December, and when for several weeks his friends did not know where he was.Īfter his collapse – just one day after he appeared in court and was making jokes – an ambulance crew tried to resuscitate him for more than half an hour, officials at Labytnang City Hospital told Russian state-run media RIA Novosti. The facility, often called the “Polar Wolf” jail, is officially known as the IK-3 penal colony and is located at Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets region, 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow. The Russian opposition leader died at a prison inside the Artic Circle where he was serving a 19-year sentence. However, he disappeared for weeks in December before resurfacing at “Polar Wolf”, a notoriously brutal prison colony in the Arctic Circle. The 47-year-old had been imprisoned since 2020, but with court appearances and his team issuing updates on social media, has rarely been away from the headlines. Alexei Navalny was the leading critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime when he collapsed and died on Friday in an Arctic penal colony.