By Canadian Press

Mother of Kremlin critic Navalny says she’s resisting pressure to agree to a secret burial

Feb 22, 2024 | 8:46 AM

MOSCOW (AP) — The mother of Russia’s top opposition leader Alexei Navalny said Thursday that she has seen her son’s body and that she is resisting strong pressure by authorities to agree to a secret burial outside the public eye.

Speaking in a video statement from the Arctic city of Salekhard, Lyudmila Navalnaya said investigators have allowed her to see her son’s body in the city morgue.

She reaffirmed the demand to give Navalny’s body to her and protested what she described as authorities trying to force her to agree to a secret burial.

“They are blackmailing me, they are setting conditions where, when and how my son should be buried,” she said. “They want it to do it secretly without a mourning ceremony.”

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Imprisoned opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza on Thursday urged Russians not to give up after the death of Alexei Navalny, and he alleged a state-backed hit squad was taking out the Kremlin’s political opponents, according to a video posted to social media.

A British-Russian citizen, Kara-Murza is serving a 25-year sentence for treason at Penal Colony No. 7 in the Siberian city of Omsk. He comments came as he appeared via a video link in a court hearing over a complaint against Russia’s Investigative Committee for what he believes were two poisoning attempts against him. He alleges the committee didn’t properly investigate the attempts.

Kara-Murza is one of several opposition figures who have either been imprisoned, forced to flee the country or killed. He was convicted of criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and was handed a stiff sentence as part of a crackdown against critics of the war and freedom of speech.

“We owe it … to our fallen comrades to continue to work with even greater strength and achieve what they lived and died for,” Kara-Murza said in the video, which was shared by the Russian Sota telegram channel.

Kara-Murza says the attempts to poison him took place in 2015 and 2017. In the first, he nearly died of kidney failure, although no cause was determined. He was hospitalized with a similar illness in 2017 and put into a medically induced coma. His wife said doctors confirmed he was poisoned.

Kara-Murza’s latest hearing came after months of postponements. In January, he was moved from another prison in Siberia and placed in solitary confinement over an alleged minor infraction.

According to the video shared by Sota, Kara-Murza alleged there is a “death squad within the Federal Security Service, a group of professional killers in the service of the state, whose task is to physically eliminate political opponents of the Putin regime.”

He said investigative journalists had shown the group of FSB officers participated in his poisoning, as well as Navalny’s poisoning with a nerve agent in 2020 and the surveillance of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov before he was shot and killed in 2015 on a bridge near the Kremlin.

On Monday, Ilya Yashin, an opposition figure serving 8 1/2 years in prison for criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine, alleged in a social media post shared on his behalf that Putin had killed Navalny.

“I have no doubt that it was Putin. He’s a war criminal,” Yashin said. “Navalny was his key opponent in Russia and was hated by the Kremlin. Putin had both motive and opportunity. I am convinced that he ordered the killing.”

“I feel a black emptiness inside,” he said, adding that he will continue to speak out even though he believes he is also in danger.

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

Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, said Thursday on her Instagram account that she had flown to visit her 20-year-old daughter, Dasha, a student at Stanford University.

“My dear girl, I came to hug you and support you, and you sit and support me” she wrote under a photo of herself and her daughter lying on a carpet.

Describing her daughter as “strong, brave and resilient,” Navalnaya said the family would “definitely cope with everything.” She also has a 15-year-old son, Zakhar.

Navalny’s family are still seeking to have his body returned to them. His mother, Lyudmila, filed a lawsuit Wednesday at a court in the Arctic city of Salekhard, near the prison colony where he died, contesting officials’ refusal to release his body, Russia’s state news agency Tass reported.

A closed-door hearing has been scheduled for March 4, the report said.

Lyudmila Navalnaya has been trying to get his body since the day after his Feb. 16 death. She has been unable to find out where it is being held, Navalny’s team reported.

Navalnaya had appealed to Putin on Tuesday to release her son’s remains so that she could bury him with dignity.

“They wouldn’t release his body to me. And they’re not even telling me where he is,” a black-clad Navalnaya, 69, said in the video, standing in front of the barbed wire of Penal Colony No. 3 in Kharp, about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.

“I’m reaching out to you, Vladimir Putin. The resolution of this matter depends solely on you. Let me finally see my son. I demand that Alexei’s body is released immediately, so that I can bury him like a human being,” she said in the video, posted on social media by Navalny’s team.

Russian authorities have said the cause of Navalny’s death is still unknown and have refused to release his body for two weeks as the preliminary inquest continues, his team said. It accused the government of stalling to try to hide evidence.

In a video on Monday, Yulia Navalnaya also accusing Putin of killing her husband and alleged the refusal to release his body was part of a cover-up.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected the allegations, calling them “absolutely unfounded, insolent accusations about the head of the Russian state.”

Associated Press, The Associated Press