‘Sudden death’? Nyet!
Putin critic Navalny was murdered, dissident’s team insists
The mother of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died Friday at the age of 47, was told Saturday her son was killed by “sudden death syndrome” — a claim his team has waved off as untrue, alleging instead that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nemesis was murdered.
Lyudmila Navalnaya was also told her son’s body would not be returned until officials completed their investigation, his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh told Reuters. That’s despite the fact that Navalny’s team was informed earlier in the day that the probe was done and that it uncovered no evidence to suggest that anything criminal had occurred.
Yarmysh added that one of Navalny’s lawyers was also told no cause of death had yet been confirmed.
“It’s obvious that they are lying and doing everything they can to avoid handing over the body,” Yarmysh wrote on X, noting that Navalny’s team has demanded his body “be handed over to his family immediately.”
Navalny’s lawyer traveled alongside the Kremlin critic’s mother to the Polar Wolf arctic penal colony, about 1,200 miles from Moscow, braving frigid temperatures in a bid to learn more about his death. They were told his body was at Salekhard morgue, but the facility was closed when they arrived. Officials subsequently “assured them [the morgue] is working and Navalny’s body is there,” Yarmysh said.
“The lawyer called the phone number which was on the door,” she continued. “He was told he was the seventh caller today. Alexei’s body is not in the morgue.”
Navalny, a former lawyer, fell unconscious and died Friday following a walk at the remote artic prison, where he was serving a 30-year sentence, authorities said. His mother on Saturday was given an official notice listing his time of death as 2:17 p.m. local time, Yarmysh said.
“Navalny was murdered. We still don’t know how we’ll keep on living, but together, we’ll think of something,” said Maria Pevchikh, head of the board of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
Navalny was initially arrested in
January 2021 upon returning from a hospital in Germany, where he had been recuperating from what his team called an assassination attempt carried out by the Kremlin. His followers revealed he initially fell ill during a flight from Tomsk, Russia, to Moscow in August 2020, with several labs around the world confirming nerve-agent poisoning to be the cause.
At that time, he was sentenced to more than two years in prison for violating probation. Then, in March 2022, Navalny was ordered to spend nine years at a high-security facility on fraud and contempt charges, alleged infractions his team has repeatedly called politically motivated.
He was handed an additional 19 years this past summer, that time on charges of extremism relating to his anti-corruption foundation.
Russian officials have repeatedly denied any involvement in the poisoning as well as his recent death.