 "Where is Alexei Navalny’s body? 3 days after death, the mystery continues")
The death of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most famous opposition leader, came as a shock but was not unexpected. Many of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s critics and enemies have had mysterious deaths . Navalny’s case is no different.
On Friday, Navalny fell unconscious and died after a walk at the “Polar Wolf” Arctic penal colony where he was serving a three-decade sentence, authorities said. A release from the prison service stated that “all the necessary resuscitation measures were carried out but did not yield positive results”. Emergency doctors confirmed the death of the convict, it said.
But was Navalny ailing? What killed him? And where is his body? Three days on, the questions remain unanswered.
How did Alexei Navalny die?
The news of Nalany’s death grabbed headlines after a release from the prison service was shared on X by former deputy minister at the Ukrainian ministry of internal affairs Anton Yuriyovych Gerashchenko. “On 16.02.2024 in the correctional colony number 3, convict Navalny A.A. has felt unwell after a walk, and has lost consciousness almost immediately. The medical workers of the institution have arrived at once, an emergency medical brigade was summoned,” they wrote, said the post.
The cause of his death is unclear.
⚡️Aleksey Navalny has died in prison - Russian Federal Penitentiary Service.
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) February 16, 2024
They wrote:
"On 16.02.2024 in the correctional colony number 3, convict Navalny A.A. has felt unwell after a walk, and has lost consciousness almost immediately. The medical workers of the… pic.twitter.com/mkkPBYQUdC
After the news was made public, Navalny’s lawyer Leonid Solovyev told Novaya Gazeta Europe, an independent media outlet, that he had visited the opposition leader on Wednesday (14 February) and “everything was all right then”.
It was on Saturday that Navalny’s team confirmed that he had died. His spokesperson Kira Yarmysh said that his mother had been notified.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThe mother and lawyer of the Putin critic flew to the penal colony on Saturday where the Kremlin critic was being held to receive official confirmation of his death. The mother was told that Nalavny was struck down by “sudden death syndrome” and that his body would not be handed over to the family until an investigation was completed, his team said.
“Sudden death syndrome” is a vague term for different cardiac syndromes that cause sudden cardiac arrest and death, reports NDTV.
“Alexey Navalny was murdered. His death occurred on February 16 at 2:17 p.m. local time, according to the official message to Alexey’s mother,” Yarmysh said in a post on social media. “We demand that Alexey Navalny’s body be handed over to his family immediately.”
**Also read: Cracking jokes, a V-Day message for wife: How Navalny spent final days in prison**Where is Navalny’s body?
According to a report in Novaya Gazeta Europe, the corpse is in the morgue of the Salekhard District Clinical Hospital. No autopsy was performed on it until Saturday.
Navalny’s body was taken to the town of Labytnangi, 36 kilometres away from the penal colony where he died. However, sources say that the body was later on Friday transferred to the District Clinical Hospital in the regional capital of Salekhard, the report said.
A paramedic in the Salekhard ambulance service was quoted by Novaya Gazeta Europe as saying that bodies are usually taken to the Bureau of Forensic Medicine but in Navalny’s case it was taken to the clinical hospital.
“They drove him to the morgue, brought him in, and then stationed two policemen in front of the door. They might as well have put up a sign saying ‘something mysterious is going on here!’ Of course, everyone wanted to know what had happened, what all the secrecy was about and whether they were trying to hide something serious,” the paramedic said.
Confusion prevailed. Some said that specialists would arrive from Moscow but others reportedly that doctors had refused to perform an autopsy on Navalny’s body.
The source told Novaya Gazeta Europe that the death was “not of criminal nature”, a term used to indicate that no firearms were involved.
According to the paramedic, he was told that Navalny’s body showed signs of bruising, although the bruises did not appear from beatings. The opposition leader must have been alive for bruising to appear.
“As an experienced paramedic, I can say that the injuries described by those who saw them appeared to be from convulsions. … If a person is convulsing and others try to hold him down but the convulsions are very strong, then bruising appears. They also said he had a bruise on his chest — the kind that comes from indirect cardiac massage,” he told Novaya Gazeta Europe.
The paramedic said that attempts were made to resuscitate the Putin critic and he “probably died of cardiac arrest”. “But nobody is saying anything about why he had a cardiac arrest,” he said.
Why has Navalny’s body not been handed over to his family?
For the mother of Alexei Navalny, the journey to recover her son’s body has been trying.
On Saturday, Lyudmila Navalnaya , 69, travelled to Navalny’s prison in the town of Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets region, some 1,900 kilometres northeast of Moscow with his team. Prison employees told her that they did not have her son’s body. They said it had been taken to the nearby city of Salekhard, a little over an hour’s drive away, as part of a probe into his death, according to a report in The Associated Press (AP).
When Lyudmila arrived in Salekhard with one of Navalny’s lawyers, however, they found that the morgue was closed, Navalny’s team wrote on their Telegram channel. When the lawyer called the morgue, they were told that the politician’s body was not there either.
Lyudmila headed directly to Salekhard’s Investigative Committee office, where she was told that the cause of her son’s death had, in fact, not yet been established, said Navalny’s spokesperson. Officials told Lyudmila that the politician’s relatives would not receive his body until they had completed additional examinations.
“It’s obvious that they are lying and doing everything they can to avoid handing over the body,” Yarmysh wrote on X after Lyudmila visited the Investigative Committee office. Navalny’s colleagues at the Anti-Corruption Foundation accused the Russian authorities of a cover-up.
Also read: How Alexei Navalny’s death puts an end to politics in Russia
Two unscheduled flights from Moscow landed at Salekhard possibly with autopsy specialists. Russia observers said that state autopsy specialists may have been flown in so that they could deliver a death certificate that pleases the Kremlin, according to a report in The Telegraph UK.
As world leaders blame the Kremlin for the death, it remains to be seen what happens next in this sad tale.
_With inputs from agencies
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