Alexei Navalny’s mother says officials want his funeral “to be held in secret”

Lyudmila Navalnaya is demanding that the body of her son, Alexei Navalny, who reportedly died on a prison walk on 16 February, be finally given to her to be buried. She says in a video posted to social media she was allowed to see the body on 20 February and signed a death certificate that day, but did not receive the body as required by law.

Local investigators in Salekhard are ready to give her all the necessary documents but are blackmailing her, she says, with their conditions. “They want the funeral to be held in secret, without any ceremony, they want to bring me to the edge of the cemetery to the freshly dug grave and to tell me ‘Here lies your son’,” she says. “I do not agree with that.”

Navalnaya insists her son’s supporters should be able to bid farewell to him. She also makes clear in her video that officials have threatened that if she doesn’t agree to a secret funeral they will mishandle Navalny’s body, telling her that “corpses decompose over time”.

Ivan Zhdanov, a former head of Russia’s Anti-corruption Foundation, said that if Navalnaya agreed to the terms offered, her son’s body would be transported by a special cargo plane to Moscow and kept in a secret morgue until a secret funeral, in order to prevent it becoming a mass event.

Navalnaya has rejected the conditions, saying she wants everything done in accordance with the law.