Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in prison, the Regional Department of the Correctional Service announced.
“On February 16 of this year, in the correctional colony number 3, convict Navalny A.A. felt bad after a walk, soon lost consciousness. Medical workers from the institution immediately arrived and an emergency medical team was called,” the statement said.
This will likely be considered a political assassination attributed to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Guradian writes.
Navalny, one of Putin’s most visible and persistent critics, was held in prison about 60 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle where he was sentenced to 19 years under a “special regime”.
In early December, he disappeared from a prison in the Vladimir region, where he was serving a 30-year sentence on charges of extremism and fraud that he called political retaliation for leading an anti-Kremlin opposition in the 2010s. He did not expect to be released during Putin’s lifetime.
A former nationalist politician, Navalny helped fuel protests in Russia in 2011-2012. by campaigning against election fraud and government corruption, investigating Putin’s inner circle and sharing the findings in videos that have garnered hundreds of millions of views.
The pinnacle of his political career came in 2013, when he won 27 percent of the vote in a mayoral election in Moscow that few believed to be free.
In 2020, Navalny fell into a coma after suspected Novichok poisoning by Russia’s FSB security service and was evacuated to Germany for treatment. He recovered and returned to Russia in January 2021, where he was arrested on parole violation charges and sentenced to the first of several prison terms, which saw him serve 30 years in prison, Klix.ba writes.
