Navalny's cause of death listed as “natural” in certificate shown to mother

A medical death certificate shown to Alexei Navalny's mother listed the opposition politician's cause of death as “natural,” as per a tweet from Navalny's press secretary Kira Yarmysh.

In a video released ealier today, Alexei Navalny's mother Lyudmila said that officers from Russia's Investigative Committee officers threatened to plan to bury Alexei in secret and then take her to his place of burial.

“[The] investigator Varapayev openly told me: ‘Time’s not on your side, bodies decompose,’” Lyudmila Navalnaya quoted one of the officers as saying.

The politician's mother said she spent close to a day at the Investigative Committee of the city of Salekhard, alone with investigators and criminalists. An attorney for the family was only allowed to attend in the afternoon on February 22.

“Last night they secretly took me to the morgue where they showed [me] Alexei. The investigators claim that they know the cause of death, they have all the medical and legal documents. I saw them already and signed the medical certificate of death.

By law, they should have given me Alexei's body immediately, but instead they’re setting conditions and blackmailing me: where, when and how Alexei should be buried. This is illegal.

They receive orders from either the Kremlin or the central office of the Investigative Committee right in front of me. They want it to be done secretly, without a funeral service. They want to bring me to the outskirts of the cemetery, to a fresh grave, and say: ‘Here lies your son.’ I do not agree to this, I want me and you to have an opportunity to say goodbye to Alexei,” said Lyudmila Navalnaya.

In the first minutes after Navalny's death was reported, the Telegram channel Baza and the state-owned Russian propaganda outlet RT attributed Navalny's death to a “detached blood clot.” RT cited an unnamed source.

Medical professionals immediately had questions about the diagnosis. ER doctor Alexander Polupan, who was part of the team that resuscitated Navalny in Omsk after he was poisoned in August 2020, told The Insider:

“They couldn’t have named this diagnosis as the cause of his death. They could only have diagnosed him with ‘sudden cardiac arrest’ and listed its possible causes without jumping to conclusions. A detached blood clot is a lay term; the proper medical term is pulmonary embolism. Diagnosing it would have required lifetime imaging, which was never done, as far as we know, because there was no equipment onsite, or the results of an autopsy. At the moment, the cause of death has not been confirmed and is therefore ineligible.

The Insider examined the versions and narratives of Navalny's death being spread by the Kremlin in a separate piece dated February 21.

SEE ALSO

• A mysterious blood clot, the missing body, and murderous Western spies: The Russian state continues to lie about Navalny’s death
• “They’re threatening to do something to my son's body”: Navalny's mother says authorities are demanding secret burial