Moscow. A human rights activist has claimed that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny may have been killed with a single punch to the heart. This is an old method used by the intelligence agency KGB. The revelation comes at a time when Russian authorities are yet to release the body of Navalny, who died suddenly a week ago in the Arctic penal colony, where he was serving a sentence for more than three years.
“Killing someone in this manner is an old method of the KGB’s special forces divisions,” Vladimir Osekin, founder of the human rights group Gulagu.net, told the Times of London, citing a source in the penal colony. “Special Forces trained operatives to kill a person with a punch to the heart, in the center of the body,” Osekin said. This was an identity of the KGB.”
KGB was a very fearsome internal security service of the Soviet era. It was officially disbanded on December 3, 1991. It was later succeeded by the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) in Russia, which later became the Federal Security Service (FSB). He claimed that before the fatal attack, the 47-year-old man was kept outside for hours in harsh sub-zero temperatures to weaken his body.
“I think the first thing they did was destroy his body by keeping him out in the cold for a long time and slowing the blood flow,” Osekin said, citing an unnamed source working at the prison. And then it becomes very easy to kill someone in a few seconds, if one has some experience in it.” According to a report, an unidentified paramedic told an independent news outlet that Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic had “bruises” on his body.
Navalny was serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges. He was transferred in December from a prison in the Vladimir region of central Russia to one of Russia’s highest-security prisons in the city of Kharp in the remote Arctic region. He had been behind bars since January 2021 when he returned to Moscow after receiving treatment in Germany following a nerve agent poisoning attack. He blamed the Kremlin for the nerve agent poisoning attack.
Navalny was born in Butin, about 40 kilometers from Moscow. He received a law degree from People’s Friendship University in 1998 and a fellowship at Yale in 2010.
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Tag: Alexey Navalny, Russia, Vladimir Putin
first published : February 24, 2024, 19:05 IST
