The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in jail, the country"s prison service has said. Navalny, 47, one of Putin’s most visible and persistent critics, was being held in a jail about 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where he had been sentenced to 19 years under a "special regime". Western reaction was swift, as top officials from the US and Europe accused the Kremlin of causing Navalny’s death. "His death in a Russian prison and the fixation and fear of one man only underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built," the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said. "Russia is responsible for this" Russian activist and Putin critic Alexei Navalny dies in prison