Workers at prison where Navalny died reportedly tried to pass off inmate’s death from torture as suicide in 2022

Workers at the “Polar Wolf” prison in Russia’s Far North where Alexey Navalny died once tried to pass off another inmate’s death as a suicide when he actually died as a result of torture, the investigative outlet Holod reported on Friday.

According to the outlet’s sources, Bakhrombek Sharifov suffocated to death in 2022 after prison employees forced him to wear a straightjacket and taped him to a mattress, a common torture method at the facility. After learning that Sharifov had died, the workers burned the objects they used to torture him and reported that he had hanged himself. However, an autopsy disproved their claims, and five staff members were charged in connection with his death.

Holod also found at least two other cases in which employees at the prison tried to conceal the causes of prisoners’ deaths by not disclosing the circumstances of the deaths to their families.

The sister of one of these inmates told journalists that prison administrators gave her and her mother only 24 hours to travel to the prison and pick up her brother’s body. When they failed to arrive in time, the man was buried in the village of Kharp, where the prison is located, with his grave marked only by his prisoner number.

One former “Polar Wolf” inmate previously told Meduza that in the three years he spent at the facility, “several dozen” inmates died. “Everyone got some kind of diagnosis, but the real cause of death remained unclear,” he said. Another inmate confirmed this account, adding that he hadn’t seen such a high death rate at any other prison in Russia.