You're reading: Ex-Kremlin aide found dead in DC hotel ‘departed US 40 days after his own death’

The mysterious death of former Kremlin aide Mikhail Lesin has gotten even weirder as details have emerged showing that Lesin -- or someone pretending to be him -- traveled out of the U.S. after his death.

Lesin, the founder of Russia’s RT news agency, largely seen as the Kremlin’s propaganda machine, was found dead in a hotel room in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 5. Although Russian media immediately proclaimed that he had died from a heart attack, many believe foul play was involved — a theory that gained credence last week when U.S. authorities announced Lesin had died from a blow to the head.

Now, just days after that revelation, a Russian activist has published documents purporting to show that Lesin’s passport went through U.S. customs in the Los Angeles airport on Dec. 15 — more than a month after Lesin had been found dead.

The documents came from the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Custom and Border Protection, which keeps a database documenting the comings and goings of foreign citizens.

Alexei Navalny, the Russian activist and anti-corruption campaigner who published the documents, questioned whether this new information could add yet another conspiracy theory to the increasingly long list of them.

“So who did they bury on the 13th (of November) in Los Angeles?” Navalny asked on his blog.

“Either way, in the context of all the other strange things (about this case), this completely brings the situation with Lesin’s death into the realm of ‘that only happens in movies.'”

In the months prior to his death, Lesin had faced scrutiny from U.S. authorities over his lavish real estate assets after a senator appealed to the Justice Department to investigate him. It is unclear whether an investigation was ever officially opened, but observers say Lesin may have been preparing to make a deal with U.S. law enforcement authorities prior to his death.

That theory gained momentum last week, when the DC Medical Examiner’s Office revealed the results of Lesin’s autopsy: He had died of blunt force injuries thought to have been caused by “some sort of altercation.” His neck, legs, arms and torso suffered injuries, as well as his head.

U.S. authorities have stopped short of classifying Lesin’s death as foul play, but they have listed the circumstances as “undetermined.”

In light of this new revelation, many wondered where Russian state media had ever gotten the idea that Lesin had died of a heart attack in the first place. The theory that the “heart attack” story was nothing but a cover-up again gained traction, and analysts said Lesin’s intimate knowledge of the innerworkings of Kremlin propaganda may have made him a dangerous liability.

Lesin was an executive in Gazprom’s media branch and the founder of the colossal RT news agency, a Kremlin-funded outlet with branches across the globe. He was also a long-time confidant to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Lesin’s death followed a pattern seen in many other high-profile deaths of figures who fell out of favor with the Kremlin, including Boris Berezovsky, the self-exiled former oligarch found dead in his bathroom outside of London in 2013 in strange circumstances, or Alexander Perepilichny, who dropped dead in London in 2012 after challenging top Russian officials.