Alexei Navalny\u2019s supporters on Saturday accused Russian authorities of being \u201ckillers\u201d who were \u201ccovering their tracks\u201d by refusing to hand over his body, as the Kremlin stayed silent despite Western accusations and a flood of tributes to the late opposition leader. The 47-year-old Kremlin critic died in an Arctic prison on Friday after spending more than three years behind bars, prompting outrage and condemnation from Wes\u00adtern leaders and his supporters. His death, which the West has blamed on the Kremlin, deprives Russia\u2019s opposition of its figurehead just a month before elections poised to extend President Vladimir Putin\u2019s grip on power. On Saturday, Navalny\u2018s mother, Lyudmila and his lawyer were refused access to his body, after arriving in the region of the remote prison colony where he had been held, his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said. \u201cIt\u2019s obvious that the killers want to cover their tracks and are therefore not handing over Alexei\u2019s body, hiding it even from his mother,\u201c Navalny\u2019s team said in a post on Telegram. Russian police on Saturday moved swiftly to break up small protests and memorials in honour of the deceased Kremlin critic. They arrested more than 340 people in 30 cities, the OVD-Info rights group said. In the capital Moscow, reporters saw two people being detained at a makeshift tribute in central Moscow, while hundreds of tearful mourners laid flowers in the snow. \u201cAlexei Navalny\u2019s death is the worst thing that could happen to Russia,\u201d said one note left among the flowers. Putin \u2018responsible\u2019 After initially pushing back at accusations they were to blame, the Kremlin made no mention of his death on Saturday, despite an angry chorus of condemnation from Western leaders. G7 foreign ministers meeting in Munich held a minute\u2019s silence for the leader on Saturday, while US President Joe Biden pointed the blame at Putin. \u201cMake no mistake, Putin is responsible for Navalny\u2019s death,\u201d he said on Friday. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference hours after news of her husband\u2019s death, Yulia Navalnaya said Putin and his entourage would be \u201cpunished for everything they have done to our country, to my family and to my husband\u201d. She called on the international community to \u201cunite and defeat this evil, terrifying regime\u201d. Russian Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov said Navalny\u2019s death was \u201cmurder\u201d and that he was \u201ctortured and tormented\u201d for all of the three years he spent in prison. Tributes continued to pour in on Saturday, as supporters staged anti-Putin protests and set up memorials to Navalny at Russian diplomatic missions around the world. In Russia, police detained hundreds of people who had laid flowers at monuments to the victims of political repression, rights groups said. In a video posted by the independent Sota outlet from the capital Moscow, a woman could be heard screaming as a crowd of police officers forcefully detained her, to chants of \u201cshame\u201d from onlookers. Another showed a group of people in plain clothes removing flowers from a monument opposite the former headquarters of the Soviet secret police, while police blocked off the area.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alexei Navalny\u2019s supporters on Saturday accused Russian authorities of being \u201ckillers\u201d who were \u201ccovering their tracks\u201d by refusing to hand over his body, as the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14452,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14451\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}