‘They’re doing everything to avoid handing over his body’: Kremlin plays for time after Navalny’s death as the battle to eradicate the opposition leader’s legacy continues after his death
ABC reports that allies of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny are demanding that Russian authorities release his body to his mother and lawyer, claiming it is being deliberately withheld. . . Navalny’s team claimed that Russian authorities are deliberately withholding his body from his family and lawyer, expressing concern that authorities could be trying to cover up signs of how he died if he was murdered.
Andrew Roth reports in The Guardian: “In Russia, it is not enough to kill an opposition leader. His ageing mother must travel to the Arctic Circle to search a prison colony and a morgue for his body. Russians with the temerity to lay carnations in his memory must be detained. Even a preliminary cause of death, “sudden death syndrome”, was misleading, as though his death behind bars was not years in the making.
All this happened the day after Alexei Navalny died, as the bureaucratic machinery of the vast Russian state swung into gear, brushing over the Kremlin critic’s death with a veneer of official disdain and petty cruelty. “It’s obvious that they are lying and doing everything they can to avoid handing over the body,” said Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s press secretary, as 69-year-old Lyudmila, his mother, and a lawyer battled to retrieve his body in the city of Salekhard. Maybe next week, investigators told them, saying the cause of death had not been established and there were still tests to run.
Navalny’s team claimed that his body is not in the morgue in Salekhard — the town near to the prison colony where he died — despite officials telling them so.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova pushed back Friday against the reaction from NATO leaders to Navalny’s death, calling the accusations against Russia “self-exposing” and saying there hasn’t been a forensic examination yet, but the West’s conclusions were already ready. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also denounced the blame from Western countries
Meanwhile, the British Tabloids are reporting Navalny’s body HAS been located covered with bruises with no body in evidence or cause of death; some reporting evidence of Convulsions or beating, but no evidence has been released.
In an even more evidence-free rumor and fear mongering on social media, the Right Wing extremists who are responsible for COVID deaths across this country are using Navalny’s death to further their own propaganda.
