The widow of Russian dissident Alexey Navalny says laboratory tests reveal that he was poisoned before his death in prison last year.
Yulia Navalnaya made the accusation in a video posted on X on Wednesday, suggesting that her husband, who died in a remote Arctic penal colony, was murdered.
The 47-year-old anticorruption campaigner, who was serving a 19-year sentence at the time of his death, was an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Navalnaya said that before his burial, his allies “were able to obtain and securely transfer biological samples of Alexey abroad”. They were then sent to two laboratories for testing, she added.
“These labs in two different countries reached the same conclusion: Alexey was killed. More specifically, he was poisoned,” Navalnaya said.
Navalnaya, who did not give further information about the samples or the results of the tests, urged the laboratories to release their findings about what she called the “inconvenient truth”.
There was no immediate comment from the Kremlin, which has denied any involvement in Navalny’s death. Authorities have previously said he died suddenly while on a walk in the IK-3 penal colony, located in Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets region.
Russian investigators have said the opposition figure died from “a combination of disease”, a conclusion dismissed by Navalnaya.
Navalny was poisoned in August 2020 in Russia before being flown to Germany for treatment.
German officials confirmed at the time that he had been poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok. Then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel said there were “serious questions that only the Russian government can and must answer”.
The Kremlin has always denied any involvement in Navalny’s illness.
After his recovery, Navalny returned to Russia, where he was arrested upon arrival and sent to prison. He was eventually convicted in multiple cases on charges that included fraud and “extremism”. He and his supporters maintained these were politically motivated charges.
In his memoir Patriot, which was posthumously published in October, Navalny wrote that he was resigned to the possibility of dying in detention.
“I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here,” he wrote on March 22, 2022.
“There will not be anybody to say goodbye to. … All anniversaries will be celebrated without me. I’ll never see my grandchildren.”
He also predicted that Putin’s rule, which he said was based on “nothing but lies”, would eventually “collapse”.
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