A prominent Russian opposition politician says that a fellow activist has died two months after an attack in which he was beaten with a metal pipe.
Aleksei Stroganov was in a coma after the attack and died on October 24 without regaining consciousness, Ilya Yashin said on Facebook on October 25.
There was no immediate comment from the authorities.
Yashin said that Stroganov was a veteran member of opposition Solidarnost (Solidarity) movement, which was co-founded by Yashin in 2008, and took part in several antigovernment rallies in 2011-2012.
Yashin, a vocal Kremlin critic who was elected to a Moscow district council in September, said that law enforcement authorities have not investigated the alleged attack by an unidentified assailant.
He said the Krasnoye Selo district council would formally request that officials open an investigation into the circumstances of his death.
Rights groups and opponents of President Vladimir Putin say attacks on opposition figures and independent journalists often go unpunished.
A prominent ally of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny, Nikolai Lyaskin, was beaten with a metal pipe by unknown attackers in September. The suspect later claimed that Lyaskin had paid him to carry out the attack.
Boris Nemtsov, another co-founder of Solidarnost, was shot dead near the Kremlin in February 2015.
In July, a Moscow court found five men from Russia's North Caucasus region of Chechnya guilty of Nemtsov's murder and sentenced them to lengthy prison terms.
But Nemtsov’s relatives and associates believe his killing was ordered at a higher level, and say justice will not be served until the person or people behind it are identified and prosecuted.
