The claim has been made even as the Russian officials are yet to release Navalny’s body.

Alexey Navalny And Vladimir Putin: In a major development related to the death of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny who died on February 16, a human rights activist has claimed that Alexei Navalny may have been killed with a single punch to the heart, an old method used by the KGB, the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 13 March 1954 until 3 December 1991. The claim has been made even as the Russian officials are yet to release Navalny’s body.

“It is an old method of the KGB’s special forces divisions,” said Vladimir Osechkin, the founder of the human rights group Gulagu.net while talking to the Times of London citing a source at the penal colony.

“They trained their operatives to kill a man with one punch in the heart, in the center of the body. It was a hallmark of the KGB,” said Osechkin claiming that ahead of the fatal strike, the 47-year-old had been kept outdoors for hours in the harsh, subzero temperatures to weaken his body.

“I think that they first destroyed his body by keeping him out in the cold for a long time and slowing the blood circulation down to a minimum,” Osechkin said, citing an unidentified source working at the prison. “And then it becomes very easy to kill someone, within seconds, if the operative has some experience in this.”

Alexey Navalny was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic who died in the Arctic penal colony where he had been serving sentences totalling more than 30 years.

Navalny’s body had “signs of bruises”, an anonymous paramedic told an independent news outlet, says a report.

The paramedic said the bodies of those who die in prison are usually taken straight to the Foreign Medicine Bureau, “but his body was taken to a clinical hospital for some reason.” The “bruises” on his body resembled marks that one suffers when being held down during a seizure, he added.

Alexei Navalny’s team has claimed that Russian authorities have told his mother he would be buried in the penal colony unless she agreed to lay him to rest without a public funeral.

Navalny’s mother Lyudmila has been demanding for days that authorities hand over his body to be buried in a way that will allow his friends, family, and supporters to pay their respects.

Navalny’s family and supporters have accused Putin of having him killed, an accusation that the Kremlin has angrily rejected. He had survived a poisoning attempt in 2020 and years of harsh treatment in prison, including long spells in solitary confinement.

Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Navalny, has released a six-minute video on Saturday and demanded that Russian authorities release his body for burial and accused a “demonic” Putin of “torturing” his corpse.

Meanwhile, the Russian officials say that Navalny “felt unwell after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness. All necessary resuscitation measures were carried out, which did not give positive results. Doctors of the ambulance stated the death of the convict. The causes of death are being established.”

In his response to Alexei Navalny’s death, US President Joe Biden said that he was ‘not surprised’ but ‘outraged’.

“He bravely stood up to the corruption, the violence and all the bad things the Putin government was doing. Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death,” Biden said at the White House.