Secretly filmed footage of Alexey Navalny’s meetings with his lawyers in prison revealed

The team of late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny has discovered secret video recordings made by prison staff of Navalny’s meetings with his lawyers, his widow Yulia Navalnaya said on Tuesday.

Navalnaya said that the videos had been sent to an email address set up by Navalny’s team after it announced a reward for any information about Navalny’s sudden death in an Arctic prison in February.

The videos, which were made with a hidden camera installed in the meeting room, showed Navalny meeting with his lawyers Olga Mikhailova, Vadim Kobzev and Alexey Liptser, in breach of attorney-client privilege, Navalnaya said, stressing that the videos “should not exist at all”.

Another hidden camera installed in the ceiling of the meeting room recorded everything that Navalny wrote down, Navalnaya said, adding that her husband had told her that at one point he stood on the table and hit the ceiling, revealing a hidden camera installed in it.

“We know for sure that the moment Alexey was killed was recorded on several video cameras,” Navalnaya said, urging those who have the footage to send it to Navalny’s team for a reward of 10 million rubles (€100,000).

Both Kobzev and Liptser, as well as another lawyer representing Navalny, Igor Sergunin, are currently on trial in connection to their work for Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, and are facing up to six years in prison for “participation in an extremist community”, while Mikhailova is now living in exile, having been forced to flee Russia to avoid prosecution.