The Russian authorities have attributed the dying six months in the past of Aleksei A. Navalny, the nation’s important opposition chief, to a seize bag of ailments aggravated by coronary heart arrhythmia, a conclusion described as preposterous by his widow on Thursday.
Mr. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, talking in a recorded statement posted on-line, mentioned she obtained a three-page doc from Russia’s Investigative Committee final week saying there was no trigger to open a prison investigation into her husband’s dying in a distant Arctic jail as a result of a mixture of medical elements had killed him.
“Right here’s a person below fixed surveillance in jail, a globally acknowledged politician, the chief of the opposition, and all of the sudden he dies inside an hour from a ‘mixed sickness,’” Ms. Navalnaya mentioned. “The report is a lie, and they’re hiding what occurred that day.”
She demanded that the authorities launch the total medical report and return Mr. Navalny’s private results to his household, together with his notebooks and the cross that he wore. The household has requested this materials repeatedly, she mentioned, however was instructed it must wait till the committee, the primary company for investigating doable federal crimes in Russia, accomplished its report.
Ms. Navalnaya mentioned that she believed the true explanation for dying was homicide by the state, and that within the absence of a reputable official inquiry, which was unlikely so long as President Vladimir V. Putin remained in energy, the household would conduct its personal investigation, irrespective of how lengthy it took. The Kremlin has strongly denied that it had Mr. Navalny killed.
On the time of Mr. Navalny’s dying, on Feb. 16, Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service mentioned he had misplaced consciousness and died after taking a stroll that day within the jail where he was moved to late last year. His dying, at 47, stripped the Russian opposition of its hottest and charismatic chief, a person who had repeatedly embarrassed Mr. Putin with investigations into corruption rooted within the Kremlin.
After surviving an tried assassination by poisoning in 2020, Mr. Navalny recuperated in Germany. He was arrested at passport management when he returned to Russia in early 2021 and transferred from one more and more harsh penal colony to a different because the court docket added greater than 30 years to his sentence on numerous prices thought of politically motivated.
In her assertion, Ms. Navalnaya famous that her husband had been deemed medically properly sufficient to be put into solitary confinement 27 occasions throughout these three years, and that no severe medical issues had been reported after what ought to have been an intensive bodily when he was transferred to a brand new penal colony in December.
He had additionally appeared cheerful and animated in a court docket look by way of video hyperlink the day earlier than he died, she famous, and had been deemed match sufficient to stroll outdoors in climate that hit minus 20 levels Celsius.
Ms. Navalnaya accused the authorities of inventing the prognosis of arrhythmia as a canopy, and dismissed the checklist of ailments that the committee mentioned her husband had as frequent with out being deadly amongst one-third of Russian adults. She laid out a special sequence of occasions in his final moments from that within the doc, though the supply of her info was unclear.
The letter from the authorities mentioned that when Mr. Navalny felt in poor health throughout his stroll, he was taken instantly to the jail’s medical heart. Each the medical workers and an emergency workforce summoned to assist didn’t revive him, it mentioned.
However Ms. Navalnaya mentioned that when Mr. Navalny felt in poor health, he was taken again to his cell and died there; and he was transferred to the medical unit solely after he had misplaced consciousness. Within the final minutes earlier than he died, she mentioned, he complained of an acute ache in his abdomen, which was not talked about within the official report.
Ms. Navalnaya mentioned the authorities ought to launch the surveillance footage from the jail, the place all rooms are monitored across the clock.
The letter from the committee included a protracted checklist of ailments, together with hypertension, persistent hepatitis and a broken vertebrae, that it attributed to his dying. It described the precise set off as a rise in blood stress that had disturbed his common coronary heart rhythm and overloaded his coronary heart.
Dr. Alexander Polupan, one in all Mr. Navalny’s former medical doctors who had helped resurrect him after he was poisoned, described the report as “implausible.” The authorities both failed to find out the reason for dying or they discovered it however determined to cover it and wrote about arrhythmia, he mentioned in a textual content message.
The illness is both congenital or can develop due to the construction of the guts, however neither had been recognized beforehand in Mr. Navalny’s case, he mentioned, and there was no indication of hypertension in his earlier medical paperwork.
Milana Mazaeva contributed reporting.
