MOSCOW.- The mother of Alexei Navalny He stated that he was able to see the body of his son, who died in an Arctic prison, but denounced “blackmail” to “secretly” bury someone who was the president’s main opponent. Vladimir Putin.
“They are blackmailing me (…). They want everything to be done secretly, without ceremony, they want to take me to the back of a cemetery, near a freshly dug grave, and tell me: ‘here lies your son’. I do not agree with that,” said Liudmila Navalnaya in a video published by her loved ones.
Navalnaya claimed to have been taken to the morgue and to have seen her son’s remains. She also says she is in Salekhard, the capital of the Iamalo Netatsia district, Great Northern region, where she died in detention on February 16, according to authorities.
The mother said investigators have established the cause of death, “and all legal and medical documents are ready.”
The late opponent’s team indicated that doctors ruled that the death was due to natural causes.
“Legally they should have returned his body to me immediately, but they didn’t. Instead they are blackmailing me,” Navalnaya criticized.
“I am recording this video because they started to threaten me. Looking me in the eyes, they say that if I do not accept a secret funeral, they will do something with his body. The investigator openly told me ‘Time is against you, the corpse decomposes,’ he declared.
The team of Putin’s main opponent accuses the Kremlin of having ordered the murder and trying to cover up its tracks.
Source: AFP
