The missing body of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been found in a hospital morgue in the Arctic, an independent Russian newspaper has claimed.
Russian prison officials announced on Friday, 16 February that Mr Navalny died aged 47 after feeling ill during a short walk at a penal colony in the Russian Arctic.
His death sparked outrage from world leaders, with many claiming Russian leader Vladimir Putin was responsible for his death.
A paramedic alleges that Mr Navalny’s body was brought into Salekhard District Clinical Hospital in Russia and his head and chest was covered in bruises, it was reported today (18 February).
The paramedic also said they believed his injuries were caused by Mr Navalny being restrained as he had seizures, and he likely died after suffering a cardiac arrest.
The unnamed paramedic told the exiled Novaya Gazeta newspaper: “The person convulses, they try to restrain him, and bruises appear. They said that he also had a bruise on his chest. That is, they still tried to resuscitate him, and he died, most likely, from cardiac arrest.”
Sources also claimed that no autopsy had yet been performed, and that two unscheduled flights from Moscow had landed at Salekhard on Saturday. It is thought autopsy specialists were on board.
The paper quoted a source as saying: “The first jet landed at about six in the evening. It was met by cars of the Investigative Committee. And the second one arrived an hour and a half later.”
However an employee at the morgue in Salekhard told Reuters that Mr Navalny’s body had not arrived.
Mr Navalny’s team yesterday claimed that Russian authorities are refusing to release his body to his family.
They said that when Navalny’s mother and lawyer visited the morgue in Salekhard, where they believed his body is being held, it was closed.
The claims about the discovery of Mr Navalny’s body have not been verified by i and a statement responding to them has not been released by his family or spokeswoman.
The announcement about Mr Navalny’s death came as leaders of Nato-member countries gathered in Germany for the start of the Munich Security Conference.
A security expert claimed to i that Putin ordered Mr Navalny to be killed in a “mafia-style” hit at the outset of the conference, where global security concerns are discussed, to send a “stark message to the West” that he disregards diplomacy.
Professor Anthony Glees, security and European politics expert at Buckingham University, said that there is a “question of timing” and he believes Mr Navalny’s death was “deliberately ordered” when Nato members – those who “believe in a free West” – will be discussing international policy.
Professor Glees said he thinks Putin ordered the death at this time to show the likes of UK Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken that he “couldn’t care less for what they’re talking about”. He said: “The death of a dissident like Mr Navalny at this time makes this message very stark.”
He claimed the nature of Russian prisons, which he calls “concentration camps”, are designed to kill their prisoners, and this is yet another example of Putin demonstrating how he deals with both “political and security threats”.
Professor Glees said that when Mr Navalny returned to Russia, he was a “dead man walking”, and believes the reason his body has not yet been released is to cover up that he was tortured before he died.
“The fact that the body has not been made available to the family is the smoking gun here,” he said, adding that he thinks the body has been “taken away to be fiddled with”.
He added that this sort of hit is “par for the course for a police state”, adding: “There is no question Mr Navalny would have been suffering torture, and death through torture could have been the only outcome.”
Professor Glees claimed “a man tortured and finished off” shows to the “free West” that “defiance cannot go unchallenged”, adding that leaders would be “foolish” not to respond to this message.
He said: “Putin is a sadist. He kills thousands in Ukraine and smirks and grins and lies about it.
“It is absolutely horrendous. Everything we know about this man is that he is a sadistic killer.”
Professor Glees said the fact Mr Navalny has died, along with countless other of Putin’s enemies, is a sign of his strength, as he has the power to order these deaths.
“This is Putin signalling what will happen to his enemies,” he said. “What we know about Putin is he is entirely ruthless about people who he believes could represent a threat to him and his mafia regime.”
Professor Andrea Sella, a chemical weapons expert, also suggested that the delay in his body being handed to his family suggests Russia is trying to cover up the cause of his death.
He told i: “It’s important that an independent autopsy takes place, but the Russians will do this as slowly as possible, and the further you move away from the process, the more difficult it becomes to define the cause of death.”
Professor Sella said the delay in the body being handed over could be a result of Russian authorities trying to hide that that he died as a result of being poisoned.
He said: “It is certainly conceivable that the window of time between the body being handed over speaks to a specific type of poisoning. The Russians have poisoned people in a wide range of ways.
“The fact he was in prison means he would have been vulnerable and had a lack of agency.”
The opposition leader’s colleagues at the Anti-Corruption Foundation accused Russian authorities of trying to cover-up how he died and claim his death was ordered by Putin.
Mr Navalny’s team argue the politician was “murdered”, and accused Russian authorities of deliberately stalling the release of his body.
Mr Navalny’s closest ally and strategist Leonid Volkov added: “Everything there is covered with cameras in the colony. Every step he took was filmed from all angles all these years. Each employee has a video recorder. In two days, there has been not a single video leaked or published. There is no room for uncertainty here.”
She added: “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 Alexei Navalny’s body be handed over to his family immediately.”
Mr Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmys claimed he was murdered and his death occurred on 16 February at 2.17 p.m. local time.
Prison officials told his mother when she arrived at the colony on Saturday that her son had perished from “sudden death syndrome”, Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Mr Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Many Western leaders have also accused the Kremlin of murdering Mr Putin’s most prominent opponent.
Foreign Secretary David Cameron said that Mr Putin should be held accountable for the death. He said: “Navalny fought bravely against corruption. Putin’s Russia fabricated charges against him, poisoned him, sent him to an Arctic penal colony and now he has tragically died.
“Putin should be accountable for what has happened – no one should doubt the dreadful nature of his regime.”
US President Joe Biden said: “There is no doubt that the death of Navalny is a consequence of something Putin and his thugs did.
“Like millions of people around the world, I’m literally both not surprised and outraged by the news.”
David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, said Mr Putin should face war crimes for the death of Mr Navalny.
He said: “I’d like to see Putin in front of that special tribunal, held to account for all of his crimes, not just in Ukraine, but as we are seeing just in the last 48 hours in Russia as well.”
Mr Navalny’s wife, Yulia, said she does know whether to believe if her husband has died.
Mrs Navalnaya told the Munich Security Conference on Friday she didn’t know if the news was true, because the Russian President and his government cannot be believed as they “lie constantly”.
Mr Navalny, who was jailed after being found guilty of extremism charges he claimed were politically motivated, had been transferred to the prison before Christmas.
