The grieving mother of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny demanded that Kremlin officials release her "son's body immediately," saying investigators "blackmailed" her to hold a "secret" burial of the body of President Vladimir Putin's most vocal critic.
In a YouTube video and on X, a defiant Lyudmila Navalnaya on Thursday said she'd been taken in secret to a morgue in Salekhard to see her son's body, and that investigators refused to give it to her for burial.
"Yesterday evening, they secretly took me to the morgue, where they showed me Alexei," she said. "I'm recording this video because they started threatening me," she said, accusing officials of "blackmailing" her over "where, when, and how Alexei should be buried," the New York Post reported.
"Looking me in the eye, they said to me if I don't agree to a secret burial, they will do something to my son's body. I demand that my son's body be given to me immediately."
Navalnaya said an investigator tried to get her to rush to a quick, secret funeral by saying that "time is not on your side, bodies decompose."
"They want to bring me to the outskirts of the cemetery, to a fresh grave, and say, Here lies your son," she said. "I don't agree with that."
President Joe Biden, Navalny supporters, and his widow Yulia claim Putin is responsible for Navalny's death. The Kremlin has denied involvement, and Putin has made no public comment.
Navalnaya appeared in a video earlier this week and appealed to Putin to turn her son's body over to her so she can bury him with dignity, The Daily Mail reported.
Navalny, 47, reportedly died Friday when he fell unconscious after a walk at the Polar Wolf penal colony about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow, where he was serving a nearly three-decade sentence on fraud, embezzlement, and extremism-related charges.
Navalny had been imprisoned since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from a nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin.
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