VLADIMIR Putin’s enemy Alexei Navalny could be executed after he vanished from his jail cell, his supporters have claimed.
Navalny, 47, the leader of Russia’s opposition party, has not been seen since December 5.
Last year, he was imprisoned in the IK-6 penal colony north-east of Moscow but the governor has revealed Navalny is no longer there.
The head of Navalny’s FBK party Maria Pevchikh said: “We are worried for his life.
“He’s in the hands of the very same people who tried to kill him before.
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“If they once got an authorisation to murder Navalny, do they have another one now or is the last one still valid. Navalny’s life is constantly at a high risk.”
Navalny was poisoned by the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok in August 2020, which he claimed was arranged by the Kremlin.
He was sentenced to more than 30 years in prison on charges of extremism and fraud.
President Putin faces an election in March 2024 which he is all but certain to win, giving him another six years in office.
Supporters of Navalny believe he has been transported to a more brutal gulag prison and so has not been able to get involved with any election.
Navalny has previously claimed Putin is desperate to silence him, after the major Kremlin critic and his team published a list of 200 oligarchs accused of being "directly responsible for the aggressive war launched against Ukraine."
The list of 200 names was part of a wider "List of 6,000" Putin accomplices and Russian war enablers that angered the state leaders.
Navalny said: "The Kremlin's really furious at our work to promote the "List of 6,000" - the list of oligarchs, bribetakers and warmongers, against whom sanctions must be imposed.
"The people on the list are very worried and are demanding measures to be taken to make the ACF (and me personally) 'back off'."
A video interview earlier this year with him revealed he suffers from mystery stomach aches, seizures and lost 18lbs in less than a month - sparking fears of a slow poisoning.
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An investigator also allegedly told him he faces a fresh trial over terrorism charges which could see him imprisoned for life.
A number of Putin’s critics have already met an untimely end.
Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium in a London hotel in 2006.
The same year, journalist Anna Politkovskaya, 48, who had published articles on human rights abuse, was shot dead in the street outside her Moscow flat.
Boris Berezovsky was discovered hanged in the bathroom of his Ascot home in 2013.
The founder of Russia Today, now known as RT, Mikhail Lesin was found dead in a hotel room in Washington DC in 2015.
Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal who had become a double agent for Britain, survived an assassination attempt in March 2018, when he and his daughter were poisoned by Novichok in Salisbury.
In 2019, Georgian Zelimkhan Khangoshvili who had fought against Russia in the second Chechen war in the early 2000s was shot twice in the head in Berlin.
