The mother of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said Thursday
that she saw her son's body and is resisting strong pressure from authorities
to accept a secret burial, away from the public eye.
In a video statement from the Arctic city of Salekhard, Lyudmila Navalnaya said investigators allowed her to view her son's body
in the city's morgue.
She reaffirmed the demand that Navalny's body be handed over to her and protested because she says they
are trying to force her to accept a secret burial.
“They are blackmailing me, they are putting conditions on where, when and how my son should be buried,” he said.
“They want me to do it secretly, without a mourning ceremony.”
For his part, from his cell in Siberia, prominent opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza on Thursday asked Russians not to give up after Navalny's death and
denounced the existence of a state-backed death squad
to eliminate the rivals of the president, Vladimir Putin, according to a video published on a social network.
Lyudmila Navalnaya said investigators allowed her to see her son's body in the city morgue.
AP Photo
Kara-Murza, who has British and Russian nationality,
is serving a 25-year sentence for treason.
He spoke from his cell during a video conference appearance in court over a complaint against the Russian Investigative Committee for what he believes were two attempts to poison him.
He alleged that the institution did not investigate these events adequately.
He is one of the key opposition figures who are imprisoned in Russia, while others are abroad or dead.
He was found guilty of criticizing Russia's war in Ukraine and received a draconian sentence as part of a crackdown on critics of the war and free speech.
In January he was transferred to a prison in Siberia,
where he was held in solitary confinement for an alleged minor infraction.
“We owe it (...) to our fallen comrades to continue working harder and achieve what they lived and died for,” Kara-Murza said in the recording, shared on the Russian Telegram channel Sota.
According to the opponent,
the poisoning attempts occurred in 2015 and 2017
.
The first time he was on the verge of death due to kidney failure, although the cause was not determined.
Two years later he was hospitalized with a similar illness and placed in an induced coma.
His wife said doctors confirmed he had been poisoned.
Kara-Murza's hearing on Thursday was held after several months of postponements.
According to the video shared by Sota, Kara-Murza denounced the existence of a “death squad within the Federal Security Service, a group of professional assassins at the service of the State,
whose task is to physically eliminate political opposition to the Putin regime ".
According to their testimony, investigative journalists had shown that the group of FSB agents participated in his poisoning, as well as that of Navalny
with a neurotoxic substance in 2020
, as well as in the surveillance of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov before his murder. in 2015.
On Monday, opposition figure Ilya Yashin, who is serving an eight-and-a-half-year prison sentence for criticizing the Russian war in Ukraine, said in a post shared in his name on his social media profiles that Putin had killed Navalny.
“I have no doubt that it was Putin. " He is a war criminal
," Yashin claimed. "Navalny was his main rival in Russia and was hated by the Kremlin. Putin had both the motive and the opportunity. I am convinced that he ordered the murder."
The Kremlin has previously denied any involvement in the illness and death of opponents, including Navalny.
Source: AP
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