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Alexei Navalny’s family have confirmed his death in a remote Arctic penal colony the day after it was announced by Russia’s prison service, as the authorities began to arrest people attending spontaneous memorial gatherings.
Navalny’s mother Lyudmila Navalnaya received a telegram on Saturday saying said he had died at 2:17pm local time on Friday, according to Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokeswoman.
The telegram was from an official at the penal colony in Kharp, the village in northern Russia to which the opposition activist was transferred in December, Yarmysh said in a video posted on YouTube.
The death of Navalny, 47, the most prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has sparked outrage from western leaders and Navalny’s supporters, who accused Putin of being responsible.
On Saturday Russia stepped up its police presence at spontaneous memorials for Navalny across the country, arresting hundreds of people and removing flowers laid there the night before.
The Kremlin has so far released little information about the circumstances of his death and has not given his body to his family, according to Navalny’s supporters.
Navalnaya and a lawyer were made to wait at the prison for two hours before learning that Navalny’s body had been transferred to Salekhard, a town 53km away, where investigators were conducting “studies” on it, according to Yarmysh.
When they arrived, the morgue was closed and staff told them they did not have Navalny’s body, she said.
Navalny, a charismatic anti-corruption activist, was jailed just over three years ago after returning to Russia from Germany following treatment for a nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on Putin.
The Kremlin then moved to isolate him from the outside world by holding him under increasingly restrictive conditions in notoriously harsh and remote prison colonies.
“Three and a half years ago Putin tried to kill Alexei. Yesterday he killed him,” Yarmysh said. “The whole world knows that the president of Russia personally gave the order, and that Alexei never feared him and never failed to speak up or act.”
On Saturday, Russians left flowers for Navalny across the country at memorials to Soviet political prisoners for a second consecutive day.
Police in Moscow were noticeably more hostile to protesters than the day before. They filmed people leaving flowers and arrested people who held signs or chanted slogans, according to a person who left flowers at the Solovetsky stone outside the headquarters of Russia’s FSB security service.
More than 170 people have been arrested at the memorials since Navalny’s death, according to independent rights monitor OVD-Info.
Navalny’s death has devastated his allies and other opposition members, who have nonetheless vowed to keep on challenging Putin.
Maria Pevchikh, who chairs Navalny’s foundation, wrote: “Navalny was killed. It’s not clear how we are going to go on living, but we will definitely come up with something together. Alexei will live on forever in millions of people’s hearts, in our thoughts and memories. Otherwise what are we for? The killers will be punished. Inevitably. We will not forgive anyone.”
Boris Nadezhdin, a previously unremarkable politician who galvanised anti-war sentiment when he attempted to challenge Putin in presidential elections this year, wrote on social media that Navalny’s death was “a huge loss for all of us”.
“Right now people across Russia and all over the world are paralysed with pain from his loss, and it seems the dream of a free Russia has dissolved. But that’s not true. I will do everything to bring about what Alexei and millions of our citizens fought for,” Nadezhdin wrote.
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