Imprisoned Russian opposition leader, Navalny, has died, says Yamalo-Nenets Prison service. Image via BBC
Navalny, known as the Russian president’s most insistent critic, died while completing his 19-year-prison sentence for alleged crimes which the vast majority said were politically inspired.
Alexei Navalny was Russia’s most resilient opposition leader for years before he died inside an overseas settlement prison on Friday
He was, as President Vladimir Putin‘s opposition leader, transferred to the IK-3- penal colony last year December, an overseas jail established for punishing offenders with hard labour and isolation.
The Yamalo-Nenets region prison service said Navalny had been “unwell” after taking a walk on Friday morning.
Navalny had “almost quickly lost consciousness”, the prison service revealed in a statement, noting that an effort to revive him by an emergency medical team had immediately failed.
“The emergency doctors declared the prisoner dead. Cause of death is being established.”
A source’s report said, Navalny’s lawyer Leonid Solovyov told Russian media he would not be commenting yet, although his close aide Leonid Volkov wrote on X: “Russian authorities publish a confession that they killed Alexey Navalny in prison. We do not have any way to confirm it or to prove this isn’t true.”
Navalny’s death has, a few minutes after its announcement by the Yamalo-Nenets prison service, attracted global attention hailing his resistance to Vladimir Putin’s “detector’s regime’ over this years.
A report, also, has it that France believes Navalny had paid with his life for opposing what it described as Russian “oppression”
While the international community points all fingers at president Putin, Norway’s foreign minister again said Russian authorities must take responsibility for his death.
Dmitry Peskov, who is Putin’s spokesperson, said that Navalny’s death had been “made known to the president” as he departed on a visit to Chelyabinsk.
A source on ground said Navalny had once fled Russia after being poisoned in 2020; and he had long opposed Vladimir Putin’s ballot box and was disqualified from running in 2018.
“Most of the Russian president’s critics have fled Russia, but Alexei Navalny returned in January 2021, after months of medical treatment. In August 2020 he was poisoned at the end of a trip to Siberia with a Novichok nerve agent,” it said.
“His team succeeded in flying him out to Germany for specialist treatment and on his return to Moscow he was immediately taken into custody. He would never leave jail again in the next 37 months.
“Navalny had long sought to challenge Vladimir Putin at the ballot box, but he was barred from running in the 2018 presidential election. Next month, Russia’s leader will stand unchallenged by any meaningful opposition.
“Anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin was banned from standing in the election because of supposed irregularities found in the thousands of signatures submitted in support of his candidacy.”
