A Russian court has rejected a lawsuit by Lyudmila Navalnaya, the mother of late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, alleging he had received inadequate medical care in the Arctic penal colony where he died, a former Navalny aide has said.
Ivan Zhdanov, head of the Anti-Corruption Foundation that was started by Navalny, said on Thursday the court in the town of Labytnangi turned down the lawsuit because it said only Nalvany could make the complaint himself.
“Alexei filed lawsuits many times for failure to provide medical care in the colonies,” Zhdanov wrote on the Telegram app. “Now that he has been killed, they deny his family’s claim with mocking language.”
Navalny‘s family and supporters have accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of having him killed, an accusation the Kremlin has rejected.
Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, said on Thursday that the court had rejected the lawsuit because it would have meant disclosing video and other information about the circumstances of his death.
Russian prison authorities said the Kremlin critic had fallen unconscious and died on February 16 after a walk outside the “Polar Wolf” prison where he was serving a three-decade sentence.
His death certificate stated that he had died of natural causes.
Lyudmila travelled to the Arctic city of Salekhard, 2,000km (1,200 miles) from Moscow, shortly after the former opposition leader’s death, where she said investigators refused to release his body from a local morgue until she agreed to bury him without a public funeral.
Thousands lined the church perimeter for his short funeral ceremony in Moscow, then went to the cemetery to lay flowers, defying the Kremlin’s warnings against large gatherings.
Navalny had survived a poisoning with a Soviet-era nerve agent in Russia in 2020 and years of harsh treatment in prison, including long bouts of solitary confinement.
