The astonishing claim is that Navalny was gradually poisoned after Putin gave the personal go-ahead as a ‘gift’ for Alexander Bastrykin’s 70th birthday (Picture: AP)
Vladimir Putin sanctioned the killing of Alexei Navalny ‘as a birthday gift for Russia’s top criminal investigator’, a leading independent media outlet has claimed.
Alexander Bastrykin, 70, long-time head of the Russian Investigative Committee, was a university classmate of the dictator in Leningrad, now St Petersburg.
He hounded Navalny for years with bogus prosecutions as part of what respected independent SOTA media outlet describes as a ‘personal grudge’.
The astonishing claim is that he was gradually poisoned after the president gave the personal go-ahead as a ‘gift’ for Bastrykin’s 70th birthday on August 27, 2023.
In the event, Navalny died almost six months later.
The outlet reports that ‘after Navalny’s arrest, sources say, Bastrykin sought Putin’s sanction to kill Navalny in the [penal] colony, eventually enlisting the support of the head of the Federal Penitentiary Service, Arkady Gostev’.
It adds that ‘in August 2023, Vladimir Putin gave permission for the slow poisoning of Alexei Navalny as a “gift” for Bastrykin’s 70th birthday’.
‘According to the original plan, it was assumed that the politician would die from cardiovascular problems before the end of 2023,’ SOTA reports.
‘But death occurred only on February 16.’
Alexei Navalny was being held at a penal colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow (Picture: Navalny team/east2west news)
Russian president Vladimir Putin had previously tried to kill Navalny (Picture: Kremlin/east2west news)
SOTA reported that Navalny had expressed concern to his team that “in his opinion, he was receiving some kind of poison”.
It was not the first time.
In 2020, Putin had deployed an FSB hit squad to poison him after a nerve agent was sprinkled in his underwear in Tomsk, Siberia.
Navalny eventually recovered thanks to German doctors after Putin permitted the ailing politician ton be flown to the West.
Despite the assassination bid, Navalny voluntarily returned to Russia – where he was immediately jailed – even though he could have remained safe in the West.
Navalny’s death — less than a month before an election that will give Putin another six years in power — has removed the dictator’s greatest political foe.
It has also deprived the Russian opposition of its most well-known politician and sparked a search for Navalny’s body, which his team said was not being returned to his family until official tests are done.
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An official note handed to Navalny’s mother stated that he died at 2.17pm local time Friday, Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokesperson said.
She added that an employee of the prison colony said that Navalny’s body was taken to the nearby city of Salekhard as part of a probe into his death.
Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that Navalny’s mother had been told by prison officials that her son had perished due to ‘sudden death syndrome’ when she arrived at his former penal colony Saturday with one of the politician’s lawyers.
When a lawyer and Navalny’s mother visited the morgue in Salekhard, it was closed, Navalny’s team wrote on their Telegram channel.
The lawyer called the morgue and was told that Navalny’s body is not there, his team said.
Another of Navalny’s lawyers went to Salekhard’s Investigative Committee and was told that the cause of Navalny’s death had not yet been established and that new investigations are being done with the results to be released next week, Yarmysh said.
Citing a biochemist, SOTA reported that if rumours of a fatal blood clot are true ‘we could be talking about any coagulant substance, which, given the lack of water in the [penal] colony and the torture regime of detention, inevitably led to thickening of the blood and, as a result, death’.
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