Russian power continues to maintain the mystery around the remains of Alexeï Navalny, and is still postponing the time for answers.
A court in the Russian Far North must examine on March 4 a complaint filed by the mother of the political opponent, who has been trying for days to recover the body of her son, who died in detention in unclear circumstances, the official agency announced TASS.
She reported on Wednesday that Lyudmila Navalnaïa filed a complaint for “illegal activities” with a court in Salekhard, capital of the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous district, a remote region of the Arctic where her son was imprisoned.
The complaint will be examined behind closed doors, the agency said.
The team of President Vladimir Putin's number 1 enemy accuses the Kremlin of having Alexei Navalny killed and of seeking to hide the evidence by not returning his remains to his loved ones.
The presidency, for its part, denied these accusations.
“Let me finally see my son”
According to the Russian prison administration, the political dissident died on February 16 in penal colony No. 3 in the town of Kharp, a high-security prison where he had been detained since the end of 2023 and was serving a 19-year sentence for “extremism ".
In a video published Tuesday, Alexeï Navalny's mother, present on site since Saturday, called on Vladimir Putin to hand over her son's body "without delay".
“I appeal to you, Vladimir Putin, the solution to this problem depends only on you.
Let me finally see my son,” she said, filmed near the penal colony where her son died.
According to the deceased's team, Russian investigators said on Monday that they would not return his remains for at least 14 days in order to carry out an "expertise".
In total, more than 60,000 people asked the government that the opponent's remains be handed over to his loved ones, according to the specialized NGO OVD-Info.
VIDEO.
“Let me finally see my son”: the message from Alexei Navalny’s mother to Vladimir Putin
The Kremlin also rejected on Tuesday the accusations of Alexeï Navalny's wife, who claimed the day before that the Russian president had her husband killed in prison.
“These are gross and completely unfounded accusations,” said its spokesperson, Dmitri Peskov.
“I don't care how a killer's spokesperson comments on my words.
Return Alexei's body and let us bury him with dignity, don't stop people from saying goodbye to him,” replied Yulia Navalnaïa, on her X account.
Read also Death of Navalny: a head of the Russian penitentiary service promoted by Putin
After miraculously surviving a poisoning in August 2020, then being treated in Germany, Alexeï Navalny, who became popular thanks to his investigations into the corruption of Russian power, chose to return to Russia in January 2021. He was immediately arrested and sentenced successively to increasingly harsh sentences, in increasingly difficult conditions of detention, and was often locked up in the cold of an isolation cell.