A court in the Russian Great North will consider on March 4 an appeal filed by the mother of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has been trying for days to receive the body of her son, who died under unknown circumstances in prison.

Russia’s official TASS news agency reported today that Lyudmila Navalnaya filed a lawsuit for “illegal activities” in a court in Salekhard, the capital of the Russian Federation’s Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Oblast, a remote Arctic region where her son was imprisoned.

The appeal will be considered behind closed doors, the agency clarified.

The group of President Vladimir Putin’s number one enemy is accusing the Kremlin of having Alexei Navalny killed and not returning his body to his relatives because it is seeking to hide the evidence. The presidency denied these accusations.

According to the administration of the Russian penitentiary, Navalny died on February 16 in the penal colony No. 3 of the Harp settlement, a high-security prison where he had been held since late 2023 and was serving a 19-year sentence for “extremism”.

In a video released yesterday, Tuesday, the mother of Alexei Navalny, who has been at the scene since Saturday, called on Vladimir Putin to hand over her son’s body to her “without delay”.

According to the deceased’s team, Russian investigators said on Monday that they would not return Navalny’s body until at least 14 days had passed so that it could be “examined by experts”.