Lyudmila Navalnaya, who only on Monday visited her son in the harsh concentration camp known as the “Polar Wolf” in Kharp, returned on Saturday morning with Navalny's lawyer and obtained documents proving that his death occurred at 2:17 p.m. local time on Friday. .
Yarmysh said prison officials told Navalnaya that the body “was taken by Investigative Committee investigators.” She added: “Now they are investigating him.”
The transport of Navalny's body from prison to the nearby city of Salekhard for a possible autopsy by Russian authorities suggests that the true cause of his death may never be known.
After Navalny was poisoned with a banned nerve agent in August 2020, he and his supporters fought unsuccessfully to return the clothes he was wearing when he was poisoned, in the hope of discovering evidence. During the investigation by Bellingcat, an investigative journalism group, Navalny later tricked an agent of Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB, into admitting that he had been sent to clean any traces of evidence from Navalny's underwear, which was in custody. From local authorities.
Lyudmila Navalnaya's struggle to recover her son's body on Saturday reflects the blatant bureaucratic cruelty when Russian security officials prevented his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, from evacuating Navalny from a Siberian hospital after his 2020 poisoning.
He was not flown to Germany until two days later, after Yulia made a personal appeal to President Vladimir Putin, who approved the request. Navalny was taken to a hospital in Berlin where he eventually recovered and returned to Moscow in 2021. He was then immediately arrested, imprisoned and given several hefty prison sentences, totaling up to 30 years, in cases he and international human rights groups have described as fabricated. For political revenge.
Yulia Navalnaya and Navalny's team leaders initially said they did not trust Russian authorities' statements on Friday about his death. But any lingering uncertainty was dispelled on Saturday.
Ivan Zhdanov, the leader of Navalny's anti-corruption foundation, now based in Vilnius, Lithuania, issued a statement saying: “That's it. It's over. Alexei Navalny has been assassinated.”
Recently, Navalny was seen on video attending a court hearing, where he appeared in good health and good spirits, even joking with court officials.
More than any other Russian opposition figure, Navalny embodied resistance to Putin's regime, and in the wake of his death, police arrested dozens of Russians who laid flowers at a spontaneous memorial service. Late Friday night, security officials removed piles of flowers with garbage bags.
In Moscow, at the Wall of Sorrow, a memorial to victims of political repression, riot police overpowered dozens of people who tried to lay flowers in Navalny's memory and dragged them to a nearby phalanx of security vehicles.
Muscovites left flowers at other highly symbolic sites, including the Solovetsky Stone, a memorial to victims of Soviet labor camps and political repression on Lubyanka Square, in front of the headquarters of the Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB.
They laid flowers on a bridge near the Kremlin where Boris Nemstov, one of Putin's opposition rivals, was shot dead on February 27, 2015.
OVD-Info, a Russian rights group that provides legal assistance to detainees, said that by mid-morning Saturday, more than 220 people had been arrested in more than 13 cities. The largest number of arrests occurred in St. Petersburg, where 119 people were arrested.
Alexander Poluban, the doctor who treated Navalny after he was poisoned with a nerve agent in 2020, said in an interview on Friday that an autopsy would be required to determine how he died.
In response to a question about the possibility of Navalny being poisoned again, he said that determining this would require a chemical and toxicological examination.
“At the moment we do not have any medical data to support either version, whether it was a violent death or a natural death,” Boloban said.
