The death of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny in an Arctic penal colony earlier this year appears to have been the result of poisoning, according to an investigation by Russian independent media outlet, The Insider.
In the report that was published on Sunday, The Insider said that the “hundreds of official documents” linked to Navalny’s case it had reviewed included two contradictory accounts of how he died. According to one version, Navalny left his prison cell for a walk and then lay on the ground, complaining of stomach pains and began vomiting before and having convulsions and losing consciousness.
However, those details were removed from a subsequent version given to his widow Yulia Navalnaya in August which only noted that Navalny experienced a “sharp decline in health” and that the cause of death was “arrhythmia” caused by a “combination of illnesses”.
Alexander Polupan, a doctor who treated Navalny in 2020 in a hospital Omsk in Siberia after he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok, said that arrhythmia would not have caused the abdominal pain, vomiting and convulsions Navalny experienced. He said the symptoms described in the documents obtained by The Insider could “hardly be explained by anything other than poisoning”.
The Insider also referred to another document — a list of items collected by investigators probing Navalny’s death. There was mention of “vomit samples” being sent for examination, though no mention of vomit was made in the documents linked to his death.
The Insider reported that Russian authorities “deliberately removed any mention of symptoms that did not fit the official narrative” of how the dissident died.
It also pointed to the penal colony’s initial refusal to hand Navalny’s body over to his family for burial, suggesting that the authorities were trying to conceal the true cause of the politician’s death.
His widow Navalnaya has previously accused authorities of not disclosing the details of her husband’s death, saying that he had complained of stomach pains before collapsing in the prison colony.
She called the arrhythmia diagnosis an “act of mockery” and a “pathetic attempt” to cover up his murder.
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