The mystery surrounding the death of Vladimir Putin’s former press minister in a Washington hotel deepened on Thursday when an autopsy revealed blunt force injuries to his head.
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On Thursday evening, District of Columbia police and the medical examiner’s office said in a joint statement that the cause of Lesin’s death was blunt force trauma to the head and contributing causes were blunt force injuries to the neck, torso, arms and legs.
Mikhail Lesin, 57, was found dead on the floor of his room in Dupont Circle on November 5. Russia’s RT television quoted family members at the time as saying he had died of a heart attack after long-term illnesses. The manner of death remained “undetermined” , the office’s statement said, and the incident is still under police investigation.
“We can not definitively state that foul play was a factor as that would be speculation at this point in the investigation”, said police spokesman Dustin Sternbeck, adding that the investigation was ongoing.
He declined to say whether the post-mortem results meant a crime may have been committed.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry official spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on her Facebook on Friday that Moscow expects official data from Washington on the investigation into Lesin’s death.
Responding to the reports, the Kremlin on Friday said it expected U.S. authorities to provide it with official information on the investigation’s progress so far.
After Lesin’s departure, President Putin spoke of his “tremendous contribution” to Russian media. Following his death, a Kremlin spokesperson insisted Mr Putin “appreciated” his “enormous contribution.to the formation of the contemporary Russian media”.
On the night he died, Lesin was scheduled to attend a gala at Washington’s Ritz-Carlton hotel honoring Russian billionaire and philanthropist Pyotr Aven, Radio Free Europe reported.
The medical examiner did not explain why the announcement came almost four months after Lesin’s death.
Lesin was for quite a long time considered among the very powerful figures on the Russian media landscape as well as in the hallways of power.
Leslin was the subject of a U.S. senator’s request to the U.S. Justice Department in 2014 to investigate whether he broke U.S. laws against money laundering in buying several expensive homes in Los Angeles.
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Russia Today, the English-language TV and online media outlet, has repeatedly cited Lesin as the man who came up with the idea of establishing the state-run network.
