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Alexei Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh has confirmed that the Russian opposition figure is dead, citing an official notice given to Navalny’s mother, Lydumila.
Navalny, a 47-year-old former lawyer, fell unconscious and died on Friday after a walk at the “Polar Wolf” Arctic penal colony in Kharp, about 1,900 km (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow, where he was serving a three-decade sentence, Russian authorities said.
“We demand that Alexei Navalny’s body be given to his family immediately,” Yarmysh said.
Yarmysh, writing on X, formerly known as Twitter, said Navalny had died at 2:17 pm local time (0917 GMT) on February 16, according to the notice given to his mother.
His body was taken to Salekhard, the town near the prison complex, by Russian investigators, who were conducting “research”, Yarmysh said.
Lyudmila Navalnaya, Navalny’s mother travelled to the prison where her son had been held on Saturday, accompanied by Navalny’s lawyer, the Novaya Gazeta newspaper reported.
The IK-3 penal colony in Kharp is situated in the Arctic Circle, around a one-hour drive from Salekhard, the administrative capital of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District.
Russian dissidents have expressed concern that the prison authorities will use the next few days of alleged investigation to hide any signs of potential foul play on Mr Nalavny’s body.
Natalia Arno, founder of Free Russia, an organisation funding opposition to the Putin regime across the world said she believed the authorities will try to erase any traces of an alleged killing.
“It’s so mean it has been done on Friday,” she told The Independent. “They [prison authorities] will probably allow the lawyers to get in the prison only on Monday and they will have enough time to hide any traces of their crime.
It comes as hundreds of flowers and candles laid in Moscow on Friday to honour the memory of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, were taken away overnight in black bags.
In central Moscow, several dozen roses and carnations remained in the softening snow on Saturday at the monument to the victims of Soviet repression, which sits in the shadow of the former KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square.
Vladimir Nikitin, 36, was alone laying a carnation at the Solovetsky Stone, which hails from the islands with the same name in the White Sea where one of the first “Gulag” forced labour camps was founded in 1923 by the Bolsheviks.
Policemen looked on.
When asked for an interview by Reuters, Nikitin asked to speak in the underpass which threads beneath Lubyanka Square, citing the fear of detention.
“Navalny’s death is terrible: hopes have been smashed,” Nikitin said.
“Navalny was a very serious man, a brave man and now he is no longer with us. He spoke the truth – and that was very dangerous because some people didn’t like the truth.”
At the “Wall of Sorrow” memorial on the avenue named after Soviet physicist and dissent Andrei Sakharov, some Russians laid flowers beside pictures of Navalny. One message read: “We will not forget, nor shall we forgive.”
“I came because I have grief,” said Arkady, who declined to give his second name. “He was a man who I respected. I had hopes that he was someone who could do something in the future.”
