Poisoned, again. Navalny’s widow says foreign labs found toxic agents in his body but have yet to publish reports

Alexei Navalny died on February 16, 2024, while serving a long sentence at Penal Colony No. 3 (IK-3) in the remote Arctic village of Kharp. Prison authorities said he collapsed after feeling unwell during a walk, but serious doubts have been raised about the official account. For several days after the prison reported his death, Navalny’s family were unable to see his body; live web-camera footage analysed by Mediazona following Navalny’s death showed a small convoy of penitentiary and police vehicles leaving the Kharp area on the night of February 16–17. 

In today’s public statement, Yulia Navalnaya has now made a series of allegations about the circumstances of Alexei’s death and the handling of evidence. She says biological samples taken from Navalny’s body were secretly smuggled out of Russia by his allies and sent to independent laboratories in at least two different countries that independently analysed them. “Laboratories in both countries came to the conclusion: Alexei was killed. Namely, poisoned.” 

Navalnaya published a reconstruction of Navalny’s final hours based on previously unseen statements from five prison employees. According to those accounts, Navalny complained of leg pain on February 16, was taken to the medical office, then moved into a punishment isolation cell (a SHIZO). He felt ill during a walk in the prison court, but was simply taken to his cell instead of the medical unit; he was later observed to be in severe distress (vomiting, clutching his chest, and suffering convulsions), but medical help was not summoned promptly.

Navalnaya says the emergency services were called more than 40 minutes after he first became seriously ill, and that resuscitation attempts by the ambulance team failed. 

“You know that every step Alexei took during these three and a half years was constantly filmed,” she wrote, showing the plan of the prison section that featured multiple CCTV cameras in the corridor and one inside the cell. “When he slept. When he went to the toilet. When he was out for a walk. When he met with his lawyers. All the time. But the recordings of the last day of his life seem not to exist.”

Navalnaya recalled that her husband survived a near-fatal Novichok poisoning in 2020, an attack which independent Western laboratories and governments concluded involved a military-grade nerve agent. She argued that Navalny’s transfer to a remote Arctic colony was part of a campaign to ensure he could be silenced.

‘I state plainly that Vladimir Putin is guilty of the murder of my husband, Alexei Navalny. I accuse the Russian security services of developing banned chemical and biological weapons. I demand that the laboratories which carried out the examinations publish their results. Stop playing games with Putin out of so-called higher considerations,” she says in the video.

It remains unclear which laboratories analyzed the samples and why those findings have not been published yet.

Russia’s authorities have rejected the possibility of Navalny being murdered in prison.