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Alexei Navalny’s mother has received an official notification of his death, according to a report by the opposition politician’s press secretary Kira Yarmysh.
“Alexey Navalny was murdered. His death occurred on February 16 at 2:17 p.m. local time, according to the official message to Alexey’s mother.
An employee of the colony said that the body of Navalny is now in Salekhard. It was picked up by investigators from the IC. Now they are conducting «investigations» with him.
We demand that Alexey Navalny's body be handed over to his family immediately.”
On February 16, Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) reported that Alexei Navalny had died, without specifying his cause of death.
The 112 Telegram channel and the propagandist television network RT then claimed that the ambulance crew that was called to attend to Navalny spent half an hour trying to resuscitate Putin’s most threatening political rival before declaring him dead due to a “detached blood clot.”
Meanwhile, Alexander Polupan, a practicing emergency room doctor who was part of the team that resuscitated Navalny after he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok by a group of FSB agents in August 2020, pointed out to The Insider that diagnosing pulmonary embolism (the medical term for Navalny’s official cause of death) on the spot would have been impossible. He noted that the fact of this diagnosis appearing so quickly and being circulated by propaganda outlets so eagerly “raises questions.”
Rallies and vigils in memory of the politician are being held in Russia and multiple cities around the world. Over 100 people have been detained across Russia while attempting to lay flowers on memorials to victims of political repression.
The first world leader to react to the report was Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics, who directly accused the Kremlin of “brutally murdering” Navalny. In their statements, most Western politicians have, to varying degrees, placed the responsibility for Navalny's death on the Putin regime.
U.S. President Joe Biden said: “There is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did. What happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality.”