“I appeal to you, Vladimir Putin ... Let me finally see my son. I demand that Alexei’s body be immediately released so that I can bury him decently,” said Lyudmila Navalnaya, the mother of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, standing outside the Siberian penal colony where her son died.
Navalnaya said when she attempted to pick up her son’s body on Saturday she was turned away. “For five days I have not been able to see him. His body has not been released to me. They don’t even tell me where he is,” she said.
Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said Monday that local investigators refused to hand over the body to his family and that it would be held for two weeks to carry out “chemical expertise.”
Yulia Navalnaya, Alexei’s wife, accused authorities of withholding the body so that “yet another Putin’s Novichok,” the nerve agent used to poison him in 2020, wouldn’t come up in a toxicology report.
