Alexei Navalny’s Mom Says She Has Seen His Physique, Refuses Secret Burial

The mom of Russia’s prime opposition chief Alexei Navalny stated Thursday that she has seen her son’s physique and that she is resisting robust strain by authorities to comply with a secret burial exterior the general public eye.

Talking in a video assertion from the Arctic metropolis of Salekhard, Lyudmila Navalnaya stated investigators allowed her to see her son’s physique within the metropolis morgue. She stated she reaffirmed the demand to offer Navalny’s physique to her and protested what she described as authorities attempting to power her to comply with a secret burial.

“They’re blackmailing me, they’re setting situations the place, when and the way my son ought to be buried,” she stated. “They need it to do it secretly with no mourning ceremony.”

Navalny’s spokesman Kira Yarmysh stated on X, previously Twitter, that his mom was additionally proven a medical certificates stating that the 47-year-old politician died of “pure causes.” Yarmysh didn’t specify what these have been.

Navalny, Russia’s most well-known opposition politician, immediately died in an Arctic jail final week, prompting lots of of Russians throughout the nation to stream to impromptu memorials with flowers and candles. The Russian authorities have detained scores of them as they search to suppress any main outpouring of sympathy for Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe forward of the presidential election he’s almost certain to win.

Navalny’s mom has filed a lawsuit at a courtroom in Salekhard contesting officers’ refusal to launch her son’s physique. A closed-door listening to has been scheduled for March 4. On Tuesday, she appealed to Putin to launch her son’s stays in order that she might bury him with dignity.

Within the video launched Thursday, Navalnaya stated she had spent almost 24 hours within the Salekhard workplace of the Investigative Committee, the place officers instructed her that they’ve decided the politician’s reason behind demise and have the paperwork prepared, however she has to comply with a secret funeral.

“They need to take me to the outskirts of the cemetery to a contemporary grave and say: ‘Right here lies your son.’ I don’t comply with this. I would like you too — to whom Alexey is expensive, for whom his demise was a private tragedy — to have the chance to say goodbye to him,” she stated.

Navalnaya accused the authorities of threatening her: “Trying into my eyes, they are saying that if I don’t comply with a secret funeral, they may do one thing with my son’s physique. Investigator Voropayev brazenly instructed me: ‘Time shouldn’t be in your facet, the corpse is decomposing’,” she stated, reiterating her demand to launch her son’s physique “instantly.”

Navalny’s demise has disadvantaged the Russian opposition of its best-known and galvanizing politician lower than a month earlier than an election that’s all however sure to offer Putin one other six years in energy. Many Russians had seen Navalny as a uncommon hope for political change amid Putin’s unrelenting crackdown on the opposition.

Since Navalny’s demise, about 400 folks have been detained throughout in Russia as they tried to pay tribute to him with flowers and candles, in keeping with OVD-Information, a bunch that screens political arrests. Authorities cordoned off among the memorials to victims of Soviet repression throughout the nation that have been getting used as websites to go away makeshift tributes to Navalny. Police eliminated the flowers at night time, however extra hold showing.

Earlier Thursday, imprisoned opposition determine Vladimir Kara-Murza urged Russians not to surrender after Navalny ’s demise, and he alleged {that a} state-backed hit squad was taking out the Kremlin’s political opponents, in keeping with a video posted to social media.

A British-Russian citizen, Kara-Murza is serving a 25-year sentence for treason at Penal Colony No. 7 within the Siberian metropolis of Omsk. His feedback got here as he appeared through a video hyperlink in a courtroom listening to over a criticism in opposition to Russia’s Investigative Committee for what he believes have been two poisoning makes an attempt in opposition to him. He alleges the committee didn’t correctly examine the makes an attempt.

Kara-Murza is considered one of a number of opposition figures who’ve both been imprisoned, pressured to flee the nation or killed. He was convicted over publicly criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and was handed a stiff sentence as a part of a crackdown in opposition to critics of the battle and freedom of speech.

“We owe it … to our fallen comrades to proceed to work with even better power and obtain what they lived and died for,” Kara-Murza stated within the video, which was shared by the Russian Sota telegram channel.

Kara-Murza says the makes an attempt to poison him passed off in 2015 and 2017. Within the first, he almost died of kidney failure, though no trigger was decided. He was hospitalized with the same sickness in 2017 and put right into a medically induced coma. His spouse stated medical doctors confirmed he was poisoned.

In accordance with the video shared by Sota, Kara-Murza alleged there’s a “demise squad inside the Federal Safety Service, a bunch {of professional} killers within the service of the state, whose activity is to bodily get rid of political opponents of the Putin regime.”

He stated investigative journalists had proven the group of FSB officers participated in his poisoning, in addition to Navalny’s poisoning with a nerve agent in 2020 and the surveillance of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov earlier than he was shot and killed in 2015 on a bridge close to the Kremlin.

The Kremlin has denied any involvement within the diseases and deaths of the opposition figures, together with Navalny.

Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, stated Thursday on her Instagram account that she had flown to go to her 20-year-old daughter, Dasha, a scholar at Stanford College.

“My expensive woman, I got here to hug you and help you, and also you sit and help me” she wrote beneath a photograph of herself and her daughter mendacity on a carpet.

Describing her daughter as “robust, courageous and resilient,” Navalnaya stated the household would “positively deal with every part.” She additionally has a 15-year-old son, Zakhar.

In a video on Monday, Yulia Navalnaya additionally accusing Putin of killing her husband and alleged the refusal to launch his physique was a part of a cover-up.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected the allegations, calling them “completely unfounded, insolent accusations concerning the head of the Russian state.”