Navalny's mother says she has been shown his body - BBC News
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The mother of the dead Putin critic says Russian authorities are pressuring her to allow a "secret" burial.

In a video message on Thursday, Lyudmila Navalnaya said she was driven to a morgue on Wednesday evening where authorities showed her the body.

Navalnaya said she recorded the video because she was being threatened into agreeing to a secret funeral for her son and that the authorities refused to give his body unless she agreed to their terms.

“They want it to be done secretly, without a goodbye. They want to bring me to the edge of the cemetery, to a fresh grave and say: ‘Here lies your son.’ I don’t agree to that,” she said.

“They say that if I don’t agree to a secret burial, they will do something with my son’s body.”

Navalnaya said the investigators told her: “Time is not on your side, the corpse decomposes.”

The Kremlin appears to be trying to make sure Navalny’s funeral does not turn into a public show of support for the opposition leader.

“Authorities fear Navalny’s funeral could turn into a political action,” wrote Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    5·
    7 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The former opposition leader’s press secretary said a medical report presented to Ms Navalnaya stated he died of natural causes.

    Ms Navalnaya travelled to the northern Russian town of Salekhard following the news of her son’s death in a nearby penal colony six days ago.

    She has previously been denied access to her son’s body, on Tuesday appealing personally to Russian President Vladimir Putin to allow her to bury him.

    Lyudmila Navalnaya was speaking in a video posted to her late son’s YouTube channel, and finished the address by demanding his body be returned to her.

    In August 2020, the former opposition leader was poisoned using the Novichok nerve agent by a team of would-be assassins from the Russian secret services.

    Attempts at commemorating his death have been met by a heavy-handed response from Russian authorities, with makeshift monuments cleared and hundreds arrested.

    The original article contains 452 words, the summary contains 143 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!