The team of the late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny said on Saturday that his body is not in the morgue in the Arctic city of Salekhard, where the prison sent his mother, reports AFP.

“Lawyer Oleksiy and his mother arrived at the Salekhard morgue. He was closed, although the colony assured that he was working and that Navalny’s body was there. The lawyer called the phone number on the door. He was told that he was the seventh person who called today and that Oleksiy’s body is not in the morgue,” opposition spokeswoman Kira Yarmich told X (formerly Twitter).

Earlier, Oleksiy Navalny’s press secretary reported on Telegram that the Russian opposition team received official confirmation of his death.

“Aleksii Navalny was killed,” the opposition team wrote in the Telegram account. According to an official statement sent to Navalny’s mother, the death occurred on February 16 at 2:17 p.m. local time.

An employee of the colony said that Navalny’s body is in Salekhard.

“Russian investigators took it. Now they are conducting “research” with him. We demand to immediately hand over the lifeless body of Oleksiy Navalny to his family,” the post reads.

Lyudmila Navalna, the mother of the Russian opposition figure, went to the colony where he died on Saturday morning, accompanied by the lawyer of Putin’s biggest opponent, Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported on Saturday, as cited by Reuters.

Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who exposed widespread corruption in Vladimir Putin’s entourage and was a fierce critic of the Kremlin, has died in prison, Reuters reported on Friday from his prison.

In December, 47-year-old Navalny was transferred to the “Polar Wolf” colony, which is considered one of the harshest in Russia, where most of the prisoners were convicted of murder or particularly serious crimes.

On the same topic:

• VIDEO Images of Oleksiy Navalny are alive. He would appear before judges on Thursday, the day before his death in a prison in northern Russia
• Who was Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident whose name Vladimir Putin refused to pronounce?
• Navalny was “brutally killed by the Kremlin” – the international reaction after the death of Putin’s main opponent