RIGA, Latvia — Russian officials at Prison Colony Number 3, just above the Arctic Circle, on Saturday refused to hand over the body of opposition leader Alexei Navalny to his mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, after formally notifying her of his death, Navalny’s spokeswoman said.
“We demand that Alexei Navalny’s body be handed over to his family immediately,” Navalny’s press secretary Kira Yarmysh wrote in a statement on Saturday.
Lyudmila Navalnaya, who had visited her son just on Monday in the harsh prison camp known as “Polar Wolf” in Kharp, returned on Saturday morning with Navalny’s lawyer and was given documentation showing his death occurred at occurring 2:17 p.m. local time on Friday.
Yarmysh said prison officials told Navalnaya that the body “was taken away by investigators of the Investigative Committee.” She added, “Now they are conducting investigations with him.”
The removal of Navalny’s body from the prison to the nearby city of Salekhard for potential autopsy by Russian authorities indicates that the true cause of his death may never be known.
Alexei Navalny’s wife and two children learned of his death from afar
After Navalny was poisoned with a banned nerve agent in August 2020, he and his supporters fought unsuccessfully for the return of the clothing he had been wearing when he was poisoned, hoping to discover evidence. During an investigation led by the Bellingcat, the investigative journalism group, Navalny later tricked an agent of the 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 the custody of local authorities.
Lyudmila Navalnaya’s struggle to recover her son’s body on Saturday echoes the stark bureaucratic cruelty when Russian security officials obstructed his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, from evacuating Navalny from the Siberian hospital after his poisoning in 2020.
He was only flown to Germany two days later, after Yulia issued a personal appeal to President Vladimir Putin who granted 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 jail terms, totaling 30 years, in cases which he and international rights groups described as trumped up for political retribution.
Yulia Navalnaya and leaders of Navalny’s team initially said that they did not trust statements by Russian authorities on Friday that he had died. But any lingering uncertainty was dispelled Saturday.
Ivan Zhdanov, a leader of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, which is now based in Vilnius, Lithuania, issued a statement saying: “That’s it. It’s over. Alexei Navalny has been assassinated.”
As recently as Thursday, Navalny was seen on video attending a court hearing, in which he seemed in good health and good spirits, and was even joking with court officials.
For Putin nemesis Alexei Navalny, long-feared death arrives in Arctic prison
Navalny embodied the resistance to Putin’s regime, more than any other Russian opposition figure and in the numbing aftermath of his death, the police arrested dozens of Russians who laid flowers at spontaneous memorials. Late Friday night, security officials with trash bags removed piles of flowers.
In Moscow, at the “Wall of Sorrow,” a memorial to the victims of political repressions, riot police overpowered dozens of people who tried to lay flowers in memory of Navalny and dragged them to a nearby phalanx of security vehicles.
Muscovites left flowers at other highly symbolic locations, including the Solovetsky Stone, a memorial to victims of the Soviet gulag and political repressions in Lubyanka Square, in front of the headquarters of the FSB, previously the KGB.
And they laid flowers at a bridge near the Kremlin where another of Putin’s opposition rivals, Boris Nemstov, was shot to death on Feb. 27, 2015.
Navalny’s health in harsh prison system was major concern before death
OVD-Info, a Russian legal rights group that provides legal assistance to detainees, said that by midmorning Saturday, more than 220 people had been arrested in more than 13 cities. The largest number of arrests was in St. Petersburg, where 119 people were detained.
Alexander Polupan, a doctor who treated Navalny after his 2020 poisoning by a nerve agent, said in an interview on Friday that an autopsy would be required to establish how he died.
Asked about the possibility that Navalny may have been poisoned again, he said determining this would require a chemical and toxicological examination.
“Right now we don’t have any medical data to support either version, was it violent death or natural death,” Polupan said.