News on Russia
Reporter : LI Zhaoxi / Editor : Lin Qing / https://www.ntdtv.com/gb/2024/02/19/a103854742.html / Image : A woman lays flowers in front of the monument to victims of political repression in Moscow on 17 February 2024, the day after the death of Russian opposition leader Navalny. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)
Navalny, the most famous critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, died on 16 February 2024, but the authorities refused to return the body to his family. The family accused authorities of hiding the body to cover up a "murder".
Prison authorities claimed that 47-year-old Alexei Navalny died of "sudden death syndrome" after losing consciousness after a walk. Navalny was secretly transferred in late December to Polar Wolf, a notoriously remote prison in Kharp, about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow, where he died on 16 February 2024, was sent to Salekhard District Clinical Hospital after his death.
According to a report by the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europe on the 18th, a paramedic said that when Navalny’s body arrived at the hospital last week, he had bruises on his head and chest.
"As an experienced paramedic, I can say that the injuries are clearly caused by convulsions," the paramedic said. "If a person is convulsing and others try to hold him down, the person convulses. Too much and you’ll get bruises.”
"They also said he had bruising on his chest, the kind caused by indirect cardiac compressions." Paramedics added that it appeared someone had attempted CPR on Navalny before his death, but "no one disclosed that he had suffered a cardiac arrest and the reason for stopping”.
Navalny’s spokesperson Kira Yarmysh stated on X that on the morning of the 17th, Navalny’s mother Lyudmila Navalnaya visited with her son’s lawyer and found the "Arctic Wolf" and got a death note saying that he died at 2.17 pm local time on the 16th.
Yarmish said prison officials told Navalny's family that his body had been moved to a morgue in the town of Salekhard, a two-hour drive away, and had been picked up by investigators from the Investigative Committee. When Navalny's mother and his lawyer arrived in Salekhard, they found the morgue closed, with only a phone number taped to the door. The director of the morgue later informed that they did not have Navalny's body.
Yarmish pointed out that the authorities provided a series of contradictory statements and unclear instructions to deliberately confuse the public and cover up the "murder" of Navalny.
"They were trying to cover their tracks, that's why they didn't give the body to his family, that's why they hid him," Ms Yarmish told the BBC. "We're convinced it wasn't just death, it was murder."
Yarmish said they were told that Navalny's body could not be released to the family until the death investigation was completed. But they were later told that "the investigation was closed" and no crime had been committed, while Navalny's body was still missing. The authorities lie all the time.
Natalia Arno, founder of Free Russia, a global organization organizing opposition to Vladimir Putin's rule, said she did not believe the Russian authorities' claims at all.
“I don’t believe in ‘blood clots',” she told The Independent. “Either strangulation, beating, poisoning. Some extreme form of killing.”
The United States and other Western countries also speculated that Navalny's sudden death was the result of the actions of the Putin group. Navalny made global headlines in August 2020 when he was poisoned in Siberia and Western laboratory tests showed that someone had tried to kill him with a nerve agent. The Kremlin denies trying to kill Navalny, who was immediately arrested upon his return to Russia in 2021.
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