Alexei Navalny body being held back to let poison traces disappear: wife

Alexei Navalny's wife has claimed that the Russian authorities are holding his body back to let traces of poison disappear. Yulia Navalnaya alleged that a poison called Novichok was used to kill the Russian opposition leader.

'Meanly and cowardly, they are now hiding his body, not showing it to his mother, not giving it (to her), and pathetically lying and waiting for the traces of another Putin’s Novichok to disappear,' she said.

In a video message, she also that their team will find out how Navalny was died and also reveal the identities of his alleged killers.

Navalny, Vladimir Putin's fiercest critic, died in his prison cell on February 16.

Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He received three prison terms since his arrest, on a number of charges he has rejected as politically motivated.

After the last verdict that handed him a 19-year term, Navalny said he understood he was “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime”.

His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, was in Brussels Monday and is expected to meet with European Union foreign ministers and other EU officials. On Sunday, she published a picture of the couple on Instagram in her first social media post since her husband's death, with the caption “I love you”.