The body of Russian opposition leader and President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic, Alexei Navalny, has been found in the morgue of a hospital in Salekhard, a city near the prison where he was held.
Following Navalny’s sudden death on Friday, his body was first taken to the town of Labytnangi, 36 kilometers away from the prison colony where he served a 19-year sentence in the town of Harp, in Russia’s far north, according to unnamed sources.
They added that later on Friday, the body was transferred to the regional capital Salekhard to the regional clinical hospital.
“Usually, the bodies of those who die in prison are taken directly to the Bureau of Forensic Medicine on Glazkova Street, but in this case, for some reason, it was taken to the clinical hospital,” said an ambulance worker in Salekhard.
“They could have put a sign saying ‘something mysterious is happening here.’ Of course, everyone wanted to know what had happened, why so much secrecy, and whether they were trying to hide something serious,” the unnamed hospital worker stated.
It was soon revealed that it was Navalny’s body and that his death was not of “criminal nature,” which is a term used to indicate that a firearm was used, the source added, stating that rumors then spread that hospital pathologists were prohibited from conducting an autopsy.
He also mentioned being told that traces of bruises were found on Navalny’s body, and although they didn’t appear to be from beatings, Navalny had to be alive at the time they appeared.
“As an experienced medic, I can say that bruises, according to those who saw them, most likely occurred from convulsions… If a person is convulsing, and others are trying to hold him, and the convulsions are very strong, then bruises appear. They also said (those who saw Navalny’s body) that he had a bruise on his chest – bruises that usually arise from indirect heart massage. So, they tried to resuscitate him, and he probably died of a heart attack. But no one is talking about why he had a cardiac arrest,” the hospital worker noted.
Navalny was arrested in 2021 upon returning from Germany, where he was treated for poisoning, as concluded by European laboratories, with the Soviet nerve agent Novichok.
In March 2022, Navalny was sentenced to nine years in prison on charges of contempt and embezzlement through fraud, which he and his supporters have repeatedly dismissed as politically motivated charges.
In August 2023, the court extended Navalny’s prison sentence to 19 years and sent him to a stricter institution with a “special regime” from a maximum-security prison where he was held. In December of last year, Navalny was transferred to such a prison in the Russian Arctic region, N1 writes.
E.Dz.
