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.