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Union parliamentary group leader Friedrich Merz: “There can be no doubt that he fell victim to a politically motivated murder.”

Photo: Michael Kappeler / dpa

Union parliamentary group leader Friedrich Merz has shown certainty that Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny has been murdered.

"There can be no doubt that he fell victim to a politically motivated murder," said the CDU chairman in the Bundestag on Thursday.

Merz sharply criticized AfD chairman Tino Chrupalla's reaction to Navalny's death.

He described it as “unbearable” that responsibility for this was already being distributed.

"People talk about murder, about other things, even though they don't know anything, even though they haven't even waited for the investigation," the AfD chairman said.

“Useful idiots of this regime”

Merz called it “downright shabby” and “inhumane.”

Addressing Chrupalla, he said: “You shouldn't seriously claim that there is such a thing as understandable investigations in this system.

Anyone who talks like that makes themselves, in the spirit of Lenin, a useful idiot for this regime.”

According to Russian authorities, 47-year-old Navalny collapsed on Friday while walking in the prison camp with the unofficial name "Polar Wolf" in the Siberian Arctic region of Yamal.

Attempts to resuscitate the prison officers were in vain, it was said.

Navalny was weakened by a poison attack in 2020 and repeated solitary confinement in the camp.

To this day, the authorities have denied his relatives access to his body, despite international protests.

Navalny's team, which accuses the Russian power apparatus of murder, sees this as an attempted cover-up.

Most recently, hundreds of Russian Orthodox clergy and laypeople called on the Moscow power apparatus to release the Kremlin opponent's body.

"We call on you to hand over Alexei Navalny's body to his family so that his mother, other family members and like-minded people can say goodbye to him and give him a Christian burial," said the appeal, which was also made by the team on Thursday of the opposition was spread.

According to Orthodox custom, believers should be buried on the third day after their death.

mfh/dpa