With her grieving face hidden from the cameras by one hand, the mother of Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, Liudmila Navalnaya, entered the IK-3 prison in the city of Jarp, in the Arctic Circle, this Saturday to search for the mortal remains of his son, whom he last saw alive just five days ago.
She found only the deliberate confusion of the Russian authorities.
“It is evident that they are lying and doing everything possible not to hand over the body,” denounced the activist's spokesperson, Kira Yarmish, after the family of Navalni, who died in strange circumstances this Friday, heard different versions of what happened.
No one around the opposition leader knows where his body is located.
What was one of Putin's most reviled dissidents, if not the most, had been secretly transferred in December to the prison in the Yamal-Nenets region, almost 2,000 kilometers northeast of Moscow.
According to the version of the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service, he fainted while taking a short walk through his facilities.
“When Alexei's lawyer and mother arrived at the penal colony this morning, they were told that the cause of Navalny's death was sudden death syndrome,” revealed the director of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, Ivan Zhdanov. .
However, a member of the investigative commission told the family that they had to repeat the tests and their results will not be known until next week.
Although later, the environment heard another different version.
Going around in circles
“The lawyers have been informed that the investigation has not established any criminal case,” Yarmish reported in the afternoon through his social networks.
“They lie literally all the time, they make us go around in circles while they cover their tracks,” denounced Navalni's spokesperson.
The only thing that Navalny's circle made clear is that the body will not be handed over "until the investigation is complete," as the Russian authorities warned them, although they do not know the whereabouts of the activist's mortal remains.
“There are no corpses in the morgues,” Zhdanov stressed.
The employees of the IK-3 penal colony told the opponent's mother that her body was sent to the Salenjard hospital.
However, when Liudmila Naválnaya and her lawyer showed up at her morgue, its doors were closed.
When calling the helpline that she had written at her entrance, the facility employees assured that Navalni was not there.
The Russian opponent, poisoned in August 2020 with a powerful chemical agent, novichok, had suffered harsh confinement since his imprisonment.
According to his environment, he was sent to the punishment cell up to 27 times since he was sent to prison in 2021.
Follow all the international information on
and
X
, or in
our weekly newsletter
.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I am already a subscriber
_