Russian authorities have threatened to bury Alexei Navalny in the grounds of the remote prison colony where he died unless his mum agrees to a secret funeral, an ally has claimed.
Lyudmila Navalnya was given an ultimatum of just three hours to agree to ‘a secret funeral without a public farewell’ for her son, according to Ivan Zhdanov, a close associate of the country’s highest profile opposition politician.
Zhdanov compared the situation to the ‘hidden’ burial of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin after his assassination last year.
He said: ‘Firstly, a murder [of Alexei Navalny] is concealed. Secondly, they are afraid that the funeral will be really massive.
’The hero is lying in a coffin and flowers are being carried to him. They don’t want to see this picture, they don’t want it to happen.’
Navalny’s mother claimed: ‘They want to do it secretly without a mourning ceremony’.
It’s the latest twist since the 47-year-old Kremlin critic died unexpectedly in an Arctic penal colony on Friday, February 16.
He was already serving a nine-year sentence for fraud and contempt of court when an extra 19 years were added to his jail term in 2023 for ‘extremism’ charges alleged to be politically motivated.
Navalny died of ‘natural causes’, according to a medical certificate shown to his mother, Navalny’s spokesperson Kira Yarmysh claim on X, formerly Twitter.
But his family has so far been unable to retrieve his body, despite investigators allowing her to see her son’s body in the morgue in the city of Salekhard.
The stand-off over Navalny’s body, along with ‘signs of bruising’ on his body and the appearance of spies at the prison where he died, have led to speculation he was killed on the Russian President Vladimir Putin’s orders.
His wife Yulia accused Putin of killing her husband, claiming his body is being hidden so traces of the Novichok nerve agent can disappear.
Putin may even have sanctioned his opponent’s gradual poisoning as a 70th birthday present for Russia’ top criminal investigator Alexander Bastrykin, who was a university classmate of the dictator, the independent SOTA media outlet claimed.
Navalny was previously poisoned with the deadly nerve agent on a flight from Siberia to Moscow in 2020. He subsequently returned to Russia from Germany, where he’d been evacuated to hospital, in order to face charges.
Another theory is that he was punched in the heart after being exposed to freezing conditions, ‘an old method of the KGB’, according to Russian human rights campaigner Vladimir Osechkin.
Lyudmila and and Navalny’s lawyers have tried to retrieve his body for a week, even appealing to Putin himself.
His mother said: ‘Let me finally see my son. I demand the immediate release of Alexei’s body so that I can bury him with dignity.’
A day later she filed a lawsuit at a Salekhard court contesting officials’ refusal to release her son’s body. A closed-door hearing has been scheduled for March 4
Their efforts to recover the body have sparked prominent Russians to appeal directly to Putin demanding Navalny’s return.
‘Just give Lyudmila her son’, said Nobel Prize-winning journalist Dmitry Muratov.
‘It’s awkward to talk about this in a country that still considers itself Christian.’
Ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov said he ‘firmly requests’ authorities give ‘the body of the murdered Alexei Navalny to his mother’.
Aside from trying to keep Navalny’s funeral away from public view, the Russian authorities have also cracked down on even the smallest of attempts to memorialise him.
Hundreds of people across Russia have laid flowers, candles and pictures at impormptu memorials across the country.
Police have responded by arresting at least 400 people as they seek to suppress the outpouring of grief and sympathy ahead of Russia’s presidential election.
Putin is almost certain to win the poll in March in a country where opposition figures are routinely imprisoned, exiled and assassinated.
Among them was Nadya Tolokonnikova, who spent nearly two years in prison for taking part in a 2012 protest with the band Pussy Riot inside Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral.
In a video, she said: ‘We were imprisoned for allegedly trampling on traditional values.
‘But no one tramples on traditional Russian values more than you, Putin, your officials and your priests who pray for all the murder that you do, year after year, day after day.
‘Putin, have a conscience, give his mother the body of her son.’
Zhdanov appealed to Russian police, troops and FSB agents to reveal the truth of Navalny’s death, MailOnline reported.
He said: ‘It doesn’t matter what your status is or whether you share the political views of Alexei Navalny.
’There are basic universal principles: you cannot mock a mother and blackmail her with the body of her murdered son.
’You cannot and should not support this. Show humanity, show sympathy for the mother who lost her son.
’Do not support Putin’s absolutely hellish cruelty and immoral crimes.’
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected the allegations that Putin ordered Navalny’s death.
He called them ‘absolutely unfounded, insolent accusations about the head of the Russian state’.
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