Bulgarian Parliament’s Deputy Speaker: Navalny was killed

According to the official information from the Kremlin regime, Alexey Navalny died, but perhaps only the most loyal to the regime cannot tell the truth, that Navalny was killed, the Bulgarian Parliament’s Deputy Speaker Nikola Minchev told the National Assembly on February 21.

Minchev, of the We Continue the Change-Democratic Bulgaria parliamentary group, said that on February 16 – a reference to the date of the Russian prison service announcement that Navalny had died – “what many thought was inevitable, others still considered unthinkable happened”.

He said that Navalny died as a result of years of agonizing conditions as a political prisoner, lack of medical care combined with constant psychological harassment.

“In the three years in which he had been behind bars, he had spent more than 300 days in a penal isolation cell. People from his team and human rights activists warned many times that his health was steadily deteriorating and he could die in prison, but the special treatment for the leader of the Russian opposition lasted longer for a whole decade,” Minchev said.

He said that in 2013, Navalny was convicted of embezzlement, but people protested and the sentence was commuted to a suspended sentence.

In 2021, Navalny was detained at a Moscow airport on his arrival from Germany, he was sentenced to prison for violating the previous sentence – never mind that during that time he was treated in a German hospital after intentional poisoning in his homeland,” Minchev said, adding that Putin’s opposition figure was subsequently sentenced to 19 years in prison on purely political charges.

“Navalny was killed by fear. In a country where the political elite for years nurtured and cultivated that there was no political alternative, Navalny was an alternative, as Boris Nemtsov was,” Minchev said, referring to the critic of Putin who was murdered near the Kremlin on February 27 2015.

“Navalny bequeathed to his countrymen not to be afraid. Today, Putin’s Russia is a dictatorship of terror,” Minchev said.

(Montage: A billboard put up near the Russian embassy in Sofia by the Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria party)

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