The mom of the late Russian opposition chief Alexei Navalny has filed a lawsuit in Russian court docket looking for her son’s physique for burial, the state information company Tass reported Wednesday.
Since Navalny’s sudden dying Friday at age 47, his mom, Lyudmila Navalnaya, has accused Russian officers of concealing his stays.
She filed her attraction within the metropolis of Salekhard, round 30 miles from the Polar Wolf facility the place Navalny spent his final months. The court docket scheduled a closed-door listening to March 4 to deal with her declare, The Related Press reported, delaying the prospect of a swift funeral.
Polar Wolf is notoriously brutal. In accordance with the BBC, prisoners are subjected to collective punishment that may contain standing exterior in Arctic winter temperatures with out coats, or being doused with water exterior within the chilly.
Navalnaya filmed a video close to the power earlier this week interesting on to Russian President Vladimir Putin for her son’s launch.
“I’ve not been in a position to see his physique for 5 days. They haven’t handed it over to me, and haven’t even instructed me the place it’s,” she said.
“I attraction to you, Vladimir Putin, as a result of the answer to this drawback relies upon solely on you. Let me lastly see my son. I demand that Alexei’s physique be launched instantly in order that I can bury him in a humane approach.”
Navalny’s household has been instructed they might not have his physique for 2 weeks, pending “some form of ‘chemical examination,’” a spokesperson for Navalny said on the platform previously generally known as Twitter.
His spouse, Yulia Navalnaya, publicly accused Putin of homicide, alleging that his operatives used the identical poison beforehand used on him — the nerve agent Novichok. The explanation officers wouldn’t launch his physique, she claimed, was as a result of they had been ready for traces of the Novichok to dissipate.
Navalny was put in a coma following a poisoning incident in 2020; he blamed Putin for the incident after his restoration, suspecting that somebody laced his tea with the nerve agent.
Throughout an emotional speech in Brussels, Yulia Navalnaya instructed the European Union Overseas Affairs Council: “[T]hree days in the past, Vladimir Putin killed my husband, Alexei Navalny. He killed my closest individual, he killed the daddy of my youngsters, he killed half of my coronary heart and half of my soul.”
Putin has denied involvement in Navalny’s dying.
Whereas lots of of courageous Russians have come out to mourn Navalny in public, some 400 of them have been arrested for doing so, according to The Washington Post. Younger male mourners have reportedly been handed draft notices amid Russia’s two-year-old warfare in Ukraine.
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