Navalny’s bruised body found in morgue
The bruised body of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, has been found in a hospital morgue in the Arctic, two days after he died in a nearby prison.
A paramedic told Russian opposition media that there were bruises on Navalny’s head and chest when his body was brought into the Salekhard District Clinical Hospital.
“Such injuries, described by those that saw them, appear from seizures,” the unnamed paramedic told the exiled Novaya Gazeta newspaper.
“The person convulses, they try to restrain him, and bruises appear. They also said that he also had a bruise on his chest. That is, they still tried to resuscitate him, and he died, most likely, from cardiac arrest.”
Russian officials said that Navalny died on Saturday after falling ill during a short walk at IK-3, a notoriously brutal prison in the Russian Arctic.
Navalny’s mother failed to find his body at the morgue in Salekhard on Sunday and his colleagues at the AntiCorruption Foundation accused the Russian authorities of a cover-up.
Reporters said no autopsy had yet been performed. They also said two unscheduled flights from Moscow had landed on Sunday at Salekhard, possibly with autopsy specialists.
“The first jet landed at about six in the evening. It was met by cars of the Investigative Committee. And the second one arrived an hour and a half later,” Novaya Gazeta quoted an unnamed source as saying.
Russia observers said autopsy specialists may have been flown in so that they can deliver a death certificate that pleases the Kremlin.
They also said that it was unusual to send the body of a dead prisoner from IK-3 to the hospital morgue.
Navalny was Vladimir Putin’s most serious opponent. Western leaders have accused the Kremlin of murdering him. He was facing three decades in prison and had been transferred to IK-3 shortly before Christmas.
David Lammy, the UK’s shadow foreign secretary, said on Sunday that Putin should face war crimes charges for the death of Navalny.
“I’d like to see Putin in front of that special tribunal, held to account for all of his crimes, not just in Ukraine, but as we are seeing just in the last 48 hours in Russia as well,” he told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg programme yesterday.
The sudden death of Navalny shocked liberal-minded Russians and triggered rare protests in Russia where demonstrations against the Kremlin are banned.
OVD-Info, a Russian activist group that monitors the Russian police, said that 400 people had been detained across Russia, mainly for laying flowers for Navalny at memorials to Soviet repression.
Analysts said that the timing of Navalny’s death is important for the Kremlin which wants to use a presidential election next month to showcase support for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago.