BREAKING: PUTIN CRITIC ALEXEI NAVALNY DIES IN PRISON

Fri 16 February 2024:

The Russian penitentiary service said on Friday that opposition figure Alexey Navalny died in a prison colony where he was serving his sentence.

The service said in a statement that Navalny lost consciousness after a walk in the Arctic Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, where the colony is located.

The ward immediately called for an ambulance, and all the necessary resuscitation measures were taken but to no avail, according to the release.

“The doctors of the emergency medical service pronounced the convict dead,” the prison service said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the doctors should determine the cause of Navalny’s death.

In a statement, the federal penitentiary service for the region where Navalny was incarcerated said that he had “felt unwell after a walk and almost immediately lost consciousness”.

“All necessary resuscitation measures were carried out but did not yield positive results,” the statement read. “The paramedics confirmed the death of the convict.”

The cause of death had not been established, the penitentiary service said. Navalny had previously been treated in hospital after complaining of malnourishment and other ailments due to mistreatment in the prison.

A lawyer for Navalny did not immediately confirm reports of his death, telling the Novaya Gazeta newspaper that Navalny’s family had requested him not to comment on the reports.

“Alexei had a lawyer at his place on Wednesday,” Leonid Solovyev, his laywer, told Novaya Gazeta. “Everything was normal then.”

A close aide also did not confirm the reports of Navalny’s death.

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.

The high-water mark in his political career came in 2013, when he won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral contest that few believed was free or fair.

He remained a thorn in the side of the Kremlin for years, identifying a palace built on the Black Sea for Putin’s personal use, mansions and yachts used by the ex-president Dmitry Medvedev, and a sex worker who linked a top foreign policy official with a well-known oligarch.

In 2020, Navalny fell into a coma after a suspected poisoning using novichok by Russia’s FSB security service and was evacuated to Germany for treatment.

He recovered and returned to Russia in January 2021, where he was arrested on a parole violation charge and sentenced to his first of several jail terms that would total more than 30 years behind bars.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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