Three days after Alexei Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest political opponent, died under unexplained circumstances at a notorious Arctic penal colony, his cause of death still has not been revealed – with Navalny’s family claiming he had been poisoned with a nerve agent on the Kremlin’s orders.
The body of the 47-year-old former lawyer-turned-political activist has yet to be turned over to his mother and the family’s legal team, prompting his fearless widow, Yulia, to publicly accuse Putin’s regime of trying to cover up a poisoning.
Here is all the evidence that suggests Navalny was poisoned.
Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service announced on Friday that Navalny collapsed while taking a walk at the “Polar Wolf” penal colony, formally known as IK-3.
The federal agency, which oversees prisons and correctional services in the country, said the opposition leader “almost immediately” lost consciousness and died despite an ambulance crew’s efforts to revive him.
However, according to the independent Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, which cited an unidentified prisoner, the ambulance only arrived after he was declared dead.
His death “became known” in the prison at about 8:00 a.m. Moscow time, hours before it was made public, the outlet also noted.
The purported time gap raises questions about the prison service’s statement saying that medics carried out “all necessary resuscitation measures” on Navalny, who by then had apparently been dead for hours.
When Navalny’s 69-year-old mother, Lyudmila, and his lawyer, arrived at the colony the next day, they were told he died from “sudden death syndrome,” according to Ivan Zhdanov, the head of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
“Sudden death syndrome” typically refers to heart-related issues that cause sudden cardiac arrest and death.
Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, on Monday claimed that her husband collapsed and died because he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok on Putin’s orders.
Death by Novichok can occur by asphyxiation or cardiac arrest, according to the BBC — which could explain Navalny’s “sudden death syndrome.”
Russian chemist-turned-defector Dr Vil Mirzayanov, who was the first to tell the world about Novichok in the 1990s, said that a large dose of the nerve agent could also cause severe convulsions resulting in death.
Bruises were spotted on Navalny’s head and chest when his body arrived at an Artic morgue, in a sign that he had experienced convulsions, a paramedic told independent Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.
His body also showed traces of indirect heart massage attempts, according to the outlet.
Novichok, which means “newcomer” in Russian, refers to a class of highly toxic nerve agents that were developed by the Soviet Union during the late Cold War period of the 1970s and 80s, reported BBC News.
Some versions of Novichoks are liquid, while others take the form of a fine powder, which could be inhaled, ingested or rubbed into the skin.
The victim could begin feeling the toxin’s effects within 30 seconds to a couple of minutes.
Similarly to other nerve agents, Novichoks block messages from the nerves to the muscles, disabling vital bodily functions.
Nearly four years earlier, Navalny narrowly survived a poisoning with Novichok, which had been applied to his underwear while he was traveling from the Russian city of Tomsk to Moscow.
Navalny was last seen alive on Thursday during a court hearing, which he attended via video link from the “Polar Wolf” prison.
The 47-year-old appeared to be in good health, giving no indication that he was suffering from any medical issues, and was heard cracking jokes with the judge about his dwindling funds.
The independent online news outlet SOTA reported that the court hearing revolved around an “argument” with a prison officer who tried to confiscate Navalny’s pen.
Navalny wrote later that he had been given another 15-day stint — his 27th since the start of his incarceration in 2021 — in solitary confinement.
His mother was also quoted by Novaya Gazeta as saying that her son had been “alive, healthy, and happy” when she last saw him on Monday.
An unnamed source told the state-controlled news outlet RT that Navalny died from a blood clot, without providing any evidence to back up that claim.
But Anna Karetnikova, a former Russian prison official, said that from her experience overseeing detention centers in the Moscow region, “blood clot” was commonly used as a handy excuse to explain away suspicious inmate deaths.
Asked about the blood clot explanation, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said: “I don’t know. I don’t know. Medics have to somehow determine it.”
Navalny’s body was transported from the penal colony in the remote Arctic settlement of Kharp, where he had been serving a decades-long prison sentence on extremism and parole violation convictions, to the Salekhard District Clinical Hospital’s morgue on Friday.
Navalny’s lawyer and his mother were barred from viewing his body at the morgue, prompting his supporters to swiftly accuse the Kremlin of a cover-up plot.
Nalvany’s widow said government officials were deliberately preventing the family from taking possession of his body to allow traces of Novichok to vanish from his system.
Zhdanov, Navalny’s close ally, said he was told by an investigator on Monday that postmortem tests on the dead opposition leader’s body will take 14 days to complete.
The Kremlin has strenuously denied any involvement in Navalny’s death — and decried Western claims that Putin had ordered his killing as unacceptable.
“When there is no information, it is unacceptable to make these rude statements,” Peskov told reporters. “These statements cannot do any damage to the leader of our country, but they definitely do not make the people saying them look good.”
With Post wires