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The mother of Russia’s deceased opposition leader has filed a lawsuit demanding the release of his body.
Lyudmila Navalnaya, mother of the late Alexei Navalny, filed suit at a court in the city of Salekhard, according to state-run news outlet Tass on Wednesday.
Court officials have reportedly scheduled a closed-door hearing for March 4.
ALEXEI NAVALNY’S MOTHER DEMANDS PUTIN HAND OVER SON’S BODY ‘SO THAT I CAN BURY HIM HUMANELY’
Alexei Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, speaks from the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp, Russia. (YouTube/Alexei Navalny)
Navalnaya released a video directed at Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday demanding he intervene and allow her to see her son’s body.
Lyudmila Navalnaya issued the plea while speaking outside a penal colony in Kharp in northern Russia, where prison officials say Navalny died last Friday after collapsing following a walk. The prominent Putin critic was serving a sentence there on charges he has argued were politically motivated.
“Behind me is the penal colony IK-3 ‘Polar Wolf,’ where on Feb. 16, my son Alexei Navalny died. For the fifth day, I can’t see him, they don’t give me his body, and they don’t even tell me where he is,” Navalnaya said.
KREMLIN CALLS NAVALNY MURDER ACCUSATIONS ‘UNFOUNDED AND VULGAR’
A flower and a picture are left as a tribute to Russian politician Alexi Navalny, near to the Russian Embassy in London. Navalny, who crusaded against Russian corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests as President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe, died Friday in the Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence, Russia’s prison agency said. He was 47. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
“I am addressing you, Vladimir Putin. The solution to the issue depends only on you. Let me finally see my son,” she added. “I demand that Alexei’s body be immediately handed over so that I can bury him humanely.”
Following his death, Navalny’s widow also asserted that the activist’s death in a Russian prison was a government-sanctioned murder.
“They are cowardly and meanly hiding his body, refusing to give it to his mother and lying miserably while waiting for the trace” of any potential poisons to vanish, Yulia Navalnaya claimed at a press conference Monday.
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Yulia Navalnaya, wife of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, speaks during the Munich Security Conference in Germany. (Kai Pfaffenbach/Pool Photo /AP)
The Kremlin pushed back on these and other accusations during a press conference on Tuesday.
“Of course, these are absolutely unfounded and vulgar accusations against the head of the Russian state,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, according to a translation from the Moscow Times.
He added, “But taking into account that Yulia Navalnaya was widowed just days ago, I will not comment.”
Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman contributed to this report.
Timothy Nerozzi is a writer for Fox News Digital. You can follow him on Twitter @timothynerozzi and can email him at [email protected]