Lyudmila Navalnaïa was finally able to see her son's body.
The mother of Russian opponent Alexeï Navalny, who died in prison on February 16, affirmed this Thursday that she had been able to see the body, after several days of waiting, but accused the Russian authorities of exercising
" blackmail”
to bury him
“secretly”
.
“They are blackmailing me, (...) They want everything to be done secretly, without ceremony, they want to take me to the confines of a cemetery, near a fresh grave, and tell me “here lies your son,” I do not agree with that
,” declared Lyoudmila Navalnaïa, in a video broadcast Thursday by the opponent’s team.
The official TASS agency reported on Wednesday that Lyudmila Navalnaïa filed a complaint for
“illegal activities”
with a court in Salekhard, capital of the autonomous district of Yamalo-Nenetsia, 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 one enemy accuses the Kremlin of having Alexeï Navalny killed and of seeking to conceal the evidence by not returning his remains to his loved ones.
The presidency denied these accusations.
According to the Russian prison administration, Alexei Navalny 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” .
According to the deceased's team, Russian investigators said Monday that they would not return his remains for at least 14 days in order to carry out an
"expertise"
.