Alexei Navalny's spokesperson confirmed Saturday that the Russian opposition leader had died at a remote Arctic penal colony and said he was "murdered." She demanded that his body be handed over to his family. An official note handed to Navalny's mother stated that he died at 2:17pm local time Friday, Kira Yarmysh said. She added that an employee of the prison colony said that Navalny's body was taken to the nearby city of Salekhard as part of a probe into his death, per the AP. "We demand that Alexey Navalny's body be handed over to his family immediately," Yarmysh wrote on X. The cause and circumstances of Navalny's death Friday remain largely unclear. His mother arrived in the area seeking to claim his body, but Yarmysh wrote on Saturday that when she and Navalny's attorney arrived at the Salekhard morgue, it was closed. "Alexey's body is not in the morgue," she wrote.
Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service reported Navalny felt sick after a walk and became unconscious at the Kharp penal colony, about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow. An ambulance arrived, but he couldn't be revived. The cause of death is still "being established," it said. Police across Russia on Saturday detained scores of people who tried to place floral tributes to Navalny. More than 100 people were detained in various Russian cities the previous day when they came to lay flowers in memory of Navalny at memorials to the victims of Soviet-era purges, per OVD-Info. The tributes were removed overnight, but people continued trickling in with flowers on Saturday, and arrests continued. Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow to face certain arrest after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin.
He was later convicted three times, saying each case was politically motivated, and received a sentence of 19 years for extremism. After the last verdict, Navalny said he understood he was "serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime." Hours after Navalny's death was reported, his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, made a dramatic appearance at a security conference in Germany, where many world leaders had gathered. She said she was unsure if she could believe the news from official Russian sources, "but if this is true, I want Putin and everyone around Putin, Putin's friends, his government to know that they will bear responsibility." US President Biden said Washington doesn't know exactly what happened, "but there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something Putin and his thugs did."
(More
Alexei Navalny stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
