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Lawyers for Alexey Navalny said Monday they have lost contact with the jailed Russian opposition leader, who was believed to be imprisoned in a penal colony about 150 miles east of Moscow, and his whereabouts are unknown.
Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in prison in August, after he was found guilty of creating an extremist community, financing extremist activities and numerous other crimes. He was already serving sentences of 11-and-a-half years in a maximum security facility on fraud and other charges he denies.
Supporters of Navalny claim his arrest and incarceration are a politically motivated attempt to stifle his criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Lawyers have made several attempts to get access to two penal colonies where Navalny, who has suffered serious health issues, was believed to be, spokesperson Kira Yarmysh said on X on Monday. They were informed that the 47-year-old was not at either the IK-6 or IK-7 penal colonies, Yarmysh added.
“On Friday and throughout today, neither IK-6 nor IK-7 responded to them,” Yarmysh posted, adding that Navalny had been missing for six days. Navalny was last imprisoned in the IK-6 penal colony east of Moscow.
For more than a decade, Mr Navalny sought to expose corruption at the heart of Russian power. His video investigations have received tens of millions of views online.
A charismatic campaigner, he seemed to be the only Russian opposition leader capable of mobilising people in large numbers across Russia to take part in anti-government protests.
But in 2020, he was poisoned in Siberia by what Western laboratories later confirmed to be a nerve agent.
A later report by the investigative outlet Bellingcat and Russian news site The Insider implicated several agents of Russia’s internal security service, the FSB, in the attack.
After recovering from the attack, Mr Navalny returned to Russia in 2021 despite warnings that he could face arrest. He was immediately arrested upon arrival at an airport in Moscow.
