Alexei Navalny’s mom said Thursday that she has finally seen her son’s body — but that it was still being kept by shady authorities who are “threatening” her to keep his cause of death a secret.
“Yesterday evening, they secretly took me to the morgue, where they showed me Alexei,” Lyudmila Navalnaya said in a video nearly a week after her 47-year-old son died in a brutal penal colony.
“I’m recording this video because they started threatening me,” she said of officials “blackmailing” her over “where, when and how Alexei should be buried.”
“Looking me in the eye, they said to me if I don’t agree to a secret burial, they will do something to my son’s body,” she said of the longtime fiercest critic of President Vladimir Putin.
“I demand that my son’s body be given to me immediately.”
One investigator even tried to get her to rush to a quick, secret funeral by saying her son’s body was “decomposing,” the mom claimed.
Navalnaya said she didn’t want special treatment, just to be given the body as per Russian law so that the married father of two can get a respectful goodbye from his family. His family believes Navalny was murdered, possibly by the same nerve agent he previously survived being poisoned by in 2020.
Instead, Rissa wants “it to be done secretly, without a farewell,” she said.
“They want to bring me to the outskirts of the cemetery, to a fresh grave, and say ‘Here lies your son.'”
“I don’t agree with that.”
The video comes days after Navalnaya said she was told there would be a 14-day “examination” on her son’s body — a claim her son’s spokesperson quickly decried as a “cover-up”
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“They are hiding Navalny’s body to cover up evidence of a murder,” spokesperson Kira Yarmysh posted on X on Monday, adding that Moscow’s claim that it needs to perform the exam is “a blatant lie and mockery.”
Yarmysh echoed the words of Navalny’s widow, Yulia, who has accused Putin and his cohorts of poisoning her activist lawyer husband in prison — and then holding onto his body to allow all traces of the Novichok nerve agent to leave his system.
The Kremlin has denied having anything to do with Navalny’s unexplained death Friday at the brutal “Polar Wolf” penal colony above the Arctic Circle.
Navalny’s mother had been denied access to his body for five days before being allowed to see him Thursday.
The mother said she had previously been told only that her son succumbed to a “sudden death syndrome” — a vague term for heart-related issues causing death, which she did not comment on in her most recent social media post.