Alexei Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnayatoday asked Russian authorities to hand over her husband’s body for burial and accused the “demonic,” as she described him, Russian President Vladimir Putin of “torturing” his body.

In a six-minute video posted to YouTube, Navalny accuses Putin of holding her husband’s body “hostage” and questions the Christian faith of the Russian president, which he himself often invokes.

Navalny’s mother, Ludmila, said yesterday that Russian investigators refuse to hand over his body from the mortuary of the remote Arctic city of Salekard until she agrees to bury him privately.

She said an official asked her to agree to the authorities’ requests as Navalny’s body had already begun to decompose.

Today, Navalny’s associates said authorities threatened to bury him in the remote prison colony where he died unless his family agreed to their terms.

In her video, Navalny’s emotional widow claims that Putin is personally responsible for the whereabouts of her husband’s body and that he is “torturing” Navalny after his death as he tortured him while he was alive.

“We already know that Putin’s faith was false. But now we see it more clearly than ever. No true Christian would do what Putin is doing with Alexei’s body,” Yulia, dressed in black, says in the video.

Since returning to the presidency of his country in 2012, Mr Vladimir Putin presents itself as a defender of traditional, conservative values ​​against what it characterizes as corrosive Western liberalism.

He also trumpets his closeness to the Russian Orthodox Church, often appearing at functions and speaking about his faith.

As Yulia said, her husband had been a devout Christian who went to church and fasted even through prison and that his political activism was inspired by Christian values.

And she concludes in her video: “Give us back the body of my husband. We want to do the funeral ceremony and bury him in a human way, in the ground, as is the custom in the orthodox Christian religion.”