A former close aide to Russian president Vladimir Putin of Russia who was found dead in a hotel room in November died of blunt force injuries to the head, the chief medical examiner’s office here said on Thursday.
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Powerful… Millionaire Mikhail Lesin was a Russian political figure, media executive and an adviser to President Vladimir Putin.
District of Columbia police spokesman Hugh Carew confirmed the results for Mikhail Lesin, who was found at the Dupont Circle Hotel in November.
Russia Today, the state-funded news channel that Mikhail Lesin had helped to create on behalf of the Kremlin, quoted an unnamed family member as claiming he had passed away from a heart attack after a lengthy illness.
Also contributing to his death were “blunt-force injuries of the neck, torso, upper extremities and lower extremities”, the statement said.
Police spokesman Dustin Sternbeck said the case is “very much an active investigation” and officials would release updates when they are available.
He declined to say if the postmortem evaluation results meant a crime might have been perpetrated.
Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry, told AFP that Moscow was still waiting for the US State Department to release information related to Lesin’s death.
According to some reports, Lesin, who was 57 at the time of his death, said he had left the company out of frustration over running a state-owned company.
Lesin was Russia’s minister of press, television and radio between 1999 and 2004, and later served as a Kremlin aide.
Although police have not declared Mr Lesin’s death a criminal act, the circumstances of his death are classified as “undetermined”.
She did not comment on Russian media reports that Lesin had been a potential Federal Bureau of Investigation informant. “We have our diplomatic channels, our immediate partner is the US State Department, but we work with other official organizations as well”, Melnik said, adding that despite their efforts “no information has been provided at this point”. In October 2013, he was appointed head of the Gazprom-Media holding.
Although friends of Lesin’s said he had been enjoying an early retirement, he had been involved in a media business in the U.S with his son where his role had prompted calls by Senator Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) for an investigation into possible financial malpractice.
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“It was unclear what Lesin was doing in Washington”.
