Alexei Navalny’s mother and his lawyers were not allowed into the morgue in the Russian town of Salekhard, near the prison colony where authorities said he died, Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said.
“One of the lawyers was literally pushed out,” Yarmysh wrote on X, adding that morgue staff would not answer a question about where Navalny’s body was.
Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, and his lawyer travelled over the weekend to the notorious “Polar Wolf” IK-3 penal colony in Russia’s Arctic north, where Navalny had been held since last year, to track down his body, but received contradicting information from various institutions over its location and left without recovering or seeing her son.
Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who was a fierce Kremlin critic, had been serving a decades-long prison term on various charges, the latest of which was a 19-year sentence on six counts, in the remote penal colony within the Arctic Circle. He had been behind bars since returning from Germany in January 2021 for charges that he rejected as politically motivated.
The 47-year-old former lawyer fell unconscious and died on Friday after a walk at the “Polar Wolf” penal colony in Kharp, about 1,900km (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow, the prison service said.
Navalny’s mother was told on Saturday at the prison colony that he had died from “sudden death syndrome”, a vague term for different hearth conditions that end in death, according to Navalny’s team.
Yarmysh said Lyudmila Navalnaya, 69, and lawyers were told that the official verification of the cause of death had been extended and that it was unclear how long it would take.
“The cause of death is ‘undetermined’,” Yarmysh said, adding that the Russian authorities were lying and stalling
