The wife of the late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny said on Thursday that investigators had told her his death in an Arctic prison colony in February was caused by a “combination of illnesses” – a conclusion she rejected as ridiculous.
Yulia Navalnaya said she would seek a criminal investigation into her husband’s death, which she considers a murder, and that Navalny’s team would continue its investigation.
Navalny, 47, died suddenly on February 16, leaving the Russian opposition without its most charismatic and popular leader. He was serving a sentence of more than 30 years on charges that were meant to suppress criticism of President Vladimir Putin.
The Kremlin has strongly rejected accusations by his supporters that Putin had him killed.
Posting on social media, Yulia Navalnaya published a copy of a three-page official letter she received last week, which said there were no criminal circumstances surrounding her husband’s death and therefore no grounds for launching an investigation.
The letter was signed by Alexander Varyapaev, the same investigating officer who, according to Navalnaya, had initially refused to hand over her husband’s body to her mother unless she agreed to bury him secretly – a demand she refused.
The letter said Navalny suddenly fell ill while walking in the prison courtyard and was taken to the medical unit, where staff tried unsuccessfully to revive him with “indirect heart massage and artificial respiration.” Emergency teams were called in, but they were unable to save him.
Navalnaya said this version was a lie and an attempt to hide.
He wrote, “We know very well that when Alexei fell ill, he was taken not to the medical unit, but back to the punishment cell. He was dying there, alone. He was taken to the medical unit already unconscious. In the last moments before his death he complained of acute pain in his stomach. Why is all this not in the resolution of the Investigative Committee?”
She did not explain how she and her husband’s supporters established the sequence of events she described.
List of diseases
The official paper said the cause of Navalny’s death was a “combination of illnesses,” a long list of which was presented, ranging from hypertension and pancreatitis to damage to his vertebrae and the presence of the herpes virus in his lungs and spleen.
It said the cause of his death was a severe rise in blood pressure which disrupted his heart’s rhythm and increased the pressure in its chambers.
Navalnaya said that “every third person in Russia” suffers from chronic diseases of the type listed in the report, and that “people do not die suddenly from such diseases within an hour”. She also challenged the diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmia.
“Tell me, how did you find this arrhythmia during the autopsy? Disturbances in heart rhythm cannot be detected posthumously, and during his lifetime Alexey had no heart disease,” she said.
He said that when Navalny appeared in a court hearing via video link on the eve of his death, he was very cheerful and jovial. And if he was indeed suffering from so many diseases, he asked, “why was such a sick person sent to a punishment cell and kept there for months?”
Navalnaya demanded a criminal case be launched, although he said there would be no investigation as long as Putin remained in power.
“Therefore, we will continue with our own investigation,” he wrote, urging prison staff and officials to contact his team confidentially and promising to pay for any new information.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
