Russia: Alexei Navalny’s mother said she had already been able to see her son’s body and denounced pressure to keep his burial secret

The mother of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said this on Thursday who saw his son’s body and who resists strong pressure from the authorities accept a secret burial, away from the public eye.

In a video statement from the Arctic town of Salekhard, Lyudmila Navalnaya said investigators had allowed her to see her son’s body. at the city morgue.

He reiterated his demand that Navalny’s body be handed over to him and protested because he says so They try 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,” she said. “They want me to do it in secret, without a mourning ceremony.”

For his part, from his cell in Siberia, the prominent opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza called on Thursday for the Russians not to surrender after the death of Navalny and denounced the existence of a state-backed death squad eliminate President Vladimir Putin’s rivals, according to a video posted on a social network.

Kara-Murza, who has British and Russian nationality, He is serving a 25-year sentence for treason. He spoke from his cell during a video conference in court on a complaint against the Russian Investigative Committee over what he believes were two attempts to poison him. He said the institution did not adequately investigate these events.

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 to work 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 Poisoning attempts occurred in 2015 and 2017. The first time he was on the brink 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 in the service of the state, whose task is to physically eliminate political opposition to Putin’s regime.

According to his testimony, investigative journalists had proven that the group of FSB agents had participated in his poisoning, as well as that of Navalny. with a neurotoxic substance in 2020as well as in the surveillance of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov before his murder in 2015.

On Monday, opposition leader Ilya Yashin, who is serving an eight-and-a-half-year prison sentence for criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine, said in a post shared under 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 said. “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 assassination.”

The Kremlin has previously denied any involvement in the illnesses and deaths of opponents, including Navalny.