TALLINN, Estonia – Allies of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny sounded the alarm on Monday, saying that neither they nor the politician’s lawyer had heard from him in six days.
Navalny, who is serving a 19-year term on extremism charges, was supposed to appear in court Monday via video link but did not, spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said.
He said prison officials cited electrical problems. Lawyers in recent days have also been unable to access Navalny, according to Yarmysh.
“It’s been the sixth day in a row that we don’t know where Alexei is and what happened to him,” Yarmysh wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Navalny, 47, has been in prison since January 2021.
As President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest enemy, he campaigned against official corruption and organized massive anti-Kremlin protests. His arrest occurred upon his return to Moscow from Germany, where he was recuperating from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin.
Navalny has since been sentenced to three prison terms and spent months in solitary confinement in a prison colony in the Vladimir region east of Moscow for alleged minor infractions.
Allies and lawyers of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny claim they have not seen him in six days. REUTERS/Evgenia Novozhenina/File Photo
He has dismissed all charges against him as politically motivated.
Last week, Yarmysh said that for three consecutive days Navalny’s lawyers spent hours in the prison colony waiting for permission to visit him, only to be denied at the last minute.
The letter to the politician was not delivered, and he did not appear at the court hearing scheduled via video link.
Navalny is serving a 19-year prison sentence on charges of extremism. AP
Yarmysh said on Friday that the development was worrying given that Navalny had recently fallen ill: “He felt dizzy and was lying on the floor. Prison officials rushed to him, unfolded the bed, placed Alexei on it and gave him an IV drip. We don’t know what caused it, but given that he was not getting food, was kept in a cell without ventilation and had been offered minimal outside time, it looked like he was passing out from starvation.”
He added that a lawyer visited him after the incident and that he seemed “more or less fine.”
Navalny will be transferred to a “special security” colony, a facility with the highest security level in the Russian prison system.
Russian prison transfers are notorious for taking a long time, sometimes weeks, during which there is no access to prisoners and information about their whereabouts is limited or unavailable.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
