Alexei Navalny would have died in prison. The first statements of the wife of the Russian opponent
Alexey Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, has said Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government will be "brought to justice" for the death of her husband.
“I want them to know that they will be punished for what they have done with our country, with my family, and with my husband,” she said at the Munich Security Conference on Friday, adding that she does not have confirmation of her husband’s death.
“They will be brought to justice and this day will come soon.”
UPDATE According to the BBC, Navalnî's press secretary, Kira Iarmîș, does not confirm information about the politician's death. "The Federal Penitentiary Service of the Yamalo-Nenetsk district spreads the news about the death of Alexei Navalny in IK-3. We have no confirmation on this yet. Alexei's lawyer is now flying to Harp. As soon as we have information, we will report it," reads a statement released by Navalny's associates.
UPDATE The first foreign leader to comment on the message regarding the death of Alexei Navalnyi, is the president of Latvia, Edgar Rinkevici. "No matter what we think about Alexei Navalny, as a politician, he was brutally murdered by the Kremlin. It is a fact and that is what we need to know about the true nature of the Russian regime. My condolences to the family and friends," reads the president's statement.
"According to the decision of Alexei Navalnyi's family, I am not commenting on anything at all. Let's figure it out now. Alexei had a lawyer on Wednesday. Everything was fine then," Navalny's lawyer, Leonid Solovyov, told Novaya Gazeta.
UPDATE The spokesman of the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, said that the doctors are to determine the causes of Alexei Navalny's death. The Russian official said President Vladimir Putin had been briefed on what had happened.
"The Federal Prison Service is engaged in all checks, clarifications and so on. There is no need for instructions here, because there is a certain set of rules in this regard that they are guided by," Peskov told reporters.
The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in jail, the country’s prison service has said, in what is likely to be seen as a political assassination attributable to Vladimir Putin, The Guardian reports.
Navalny, 47, one of Putin’s most visible and persistent critics, was being held in a jail about 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle where he had been sentenced to 19 years under a “special regime”.
In early December he had disappeared from a prison in the Vladimir region, where he was serving a 30-year sentence on extremism and fraud charges that he had called political retribution for leading the anti-Kremlin opposition of the 2010s. He did not expect to be released during Putin’s lifetime.
A former nationalist politician, Navalny helped foment the 2011-12 protests in Russia by campaigning against election fraud and government corruption, investigating Putin’s inner circle and sharing the findings in slick videos that garnered hundreds of millions of views.
