In a movie clip that was published on-line stands Alexei Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, outside the penal colony IK-3, which is also called the “Polar Wolf”, in the northern Ural Mountains in Russia.
On Friday, Russian authorities announced that her son had died inside the penitentiary, under circumstances that are still surrounded by many question marks, something TV4 Nyheterna previously reported on.
– This is the fifth day that I haven’t been able to see him. They have not handed over his body or told where he is, says Alexei Navalny’s mother in the clip.
– I am turning to you, Vladimir Putin. The solution to the problem is up to you. Let me finally see my son. I demand the immediate handover of Alexei’s body so that I can bury him humanely.
Tens of thousands of claims
In connection with the video clip being posted, Alexei Navalny’s associate Ivan Zhdanov announced that a formal lawsuit has been filed in court, as Russian authorities’ investigators refuse to hand over the remains.
Since Navalny’s death, more than 60,000 people have addressed formal calls to Russia’s Federal Investigative Committee for the remains to be handed over to his relatives, reports the legal organization OVD-Info.
The committee announced late Monday that Navalny’s remains had been sent on for a two-week “chemical examination.”
Various anonymous accounts in independent Russian media describe an unusual course of events last Friday, in connection with the death warrant. The remains are said to have been moved between different morgues and guarded by police officers. Some informants describe injuries to the body.
Kremlin: Rude
The lawyer and opposition politician Alexei Navalny has emerged for many years as a leading figure within the Russian opposition, which is excluded from the controlled power system.
He has been imprisoned in Russia for three years, most of it in a penal colony, and several times in solitary confinement. At the end of last year, he disappeared for several weeks during a long transport to the remote “Polar Wolf”, north of the Arctic Circle.
A large number of governments in the West accuse Putin of bearing the ultimate responsibility for the death of Alexei Navalny. So does his wife Yulia Navalnaya.
The Russian president’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, dismisses these accusations as baseless and indecent, but otherwise says he does not want to comment on the actions of a grieving widow.
“I don’t care what a murderer’s press secretary says about my statements,” Navalnaya writes on social media.