Not a thrombosis, nor a “sudden death syndrome” – the two explanations given in the first hours by the Russian prison authorities – but not even Novichok poisoning. Alexei Navalny was reportedly killed by his captors with a straight punch to the heart, an infamous KGB technique, after being left frozen for more than two and a half hours. This is what the founder of the NGO Gulag.net says Vladimir Osechkin, who claims to have received indications to this effect from a person working in the penal colony in the Arctic where the Kremlin opponent died. His testimony is collected by Times. According to the reconstruction of Osechkin, a Russian dissident in exile whose website collects and publishes the testimonies of prisoners and jailers of Vladimir Putin's regime, a “death protocol” borrowed from KGB special forces manuals would have been applied to Navalny. Previously, he would have been forced to stay more than two and a half hours in an open confinement space on days when the temperature in the Arctic region dropped as low as -27 degrees. At that time, once his body was weakened, the final blow would come, to his heart. “I think they first destroyed his body by freezing him for a long time to minimally slow down his blood circulation,” Osechkin says. “At this point it becomes very easy to kill someone, it only takes a few seconds if the agent has some experience with the techniques.” The technique adopted would precisely be that of the right fist on the heart, in the center of the chest: “an old method, a trademark of the KGB”, explains the dissident to Times. Several other prisoners were thus killed in the Arctic penal colonies, and the bruises found on Navalny's body, according to the prison sources in question, would be compatible with this reconstruction. A theory currently impossible to verify, given that no one else was able to see the body of the dissident, despite the insistence of his mother and the lawyers, who arrived at the threshold of the Salekhard morgue, where he is presumed to be find. “They won’t give it back to us for 14 days,” Navalny’s spokeswoman said despondently on Monday.
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