The mother of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny appealed to President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to intervene and hand over her son’s body so she could bury him with dignity.

Lyudmila Navalnaya, who has been trying to get his body since Saturday, appeared in a video outside the Arctic penal colony where Navalny died on Friday.

“I haven’t been able to see him since the fifth day. They didn’t want to give me his body. And they don’t even tell me where he is,” a black-clad Navalnaya said in the video, looking at the barbed wire at Penal Colony No. 3 in Charp, about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.

“I turn to you, Vladimir Putin. The solution to this matter depends solely on you. Let me finally see my son. “I demand that Alexei’s body be released immediately so that I can bury him like a human being,” she said in the video posted on social media by Navalny’s team.

Russian authorities said Navalny’s cause of death was still unknown and refused to release his body for the next two weeks while the preliminary investigation continued, members of his team said.

They accused the government of trying to hide evidence. On Monday, Navalny’s widow Yulia released a video accusing Putin of killing her husband and claiming the refusal to release his body was part of a cover-up.

“They cowardly and meanly hide his body, refuse to give it to his mother and lie pathetically,” she said.

Lyudmila Navalnaya and her son’s lawyers went to law enforcement and to the morgue where the body is believed to be kept in the Arctic, but were unable to get them to hand it over or say where it was.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed allegations of a cover-up, telling reporters: “These are absolutely unfounded, outrageous accusations against the Russian head of state.”

With Navalny’s death, the Russian opposition has lost its best-known and inspirational politician, less than a month before an election that will almost certainly give Putin another six years in power. Many Russians saw in Navalny a rare hope for political change amid Putin’s relentless crackdown on the opposition.

In her Monday video, Yulia Navalnaya promised to continue her fight against the Kremlin. On Tuesday, her account on X, where she posted the video, was blocked by the platform without explanation.

In a speech on Monday to the European Union’s Foreign Affairs Council, she called on EU leaders not to recognize the results of next month’s elections, sanction more Putin allies and help Russians fleeing the country flee. A copy of her remarks was released Tuesday by Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh.

Navalny, 47, had been detained since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recovering in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. He has since received three prison sentences on charges he dismissed as politically motivated.

Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, called for an international investigation into Navalny’s death, but Peskov said the Kremlin would not agree to such a demand.

About 400 people have been arrested across Russia since Navalny’s death as they tried to pay tribute to him with flowers and candles, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors political arrests. Authorities cordoned off some memorials to victims of Soviet repression across the country that served as sites for makeshift memorials to Navalny. At night the police removed the flowers, but new ones keep appearing.

Peskov said police acted “in accordance with the law” by arresting people who paid tribute to Navalny.

More than 60,000 people have applied to the government to hand over Navalny’s remains to his relatives, OVD-Info said.

After the latest verdict, which resulted in a 19-year prison sentence, Navalny said he understood that he was “serving a life sentence measured by the length of my life or the lifespan of this regime.”

In Monday’s video, his widow said: “By killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul.”

“But I still have the other half and it shows me that I have no right to give up. “I will continue the work of Alexei Navalny,” said Yulia Navalnaya.