The incarcerated editor-in-chief of the independent Mediazona news web site has actually been placed in a chock-full cell amid reports of detention facilities overflowing after mass apprehensions at rallies in support of incarcerated Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, his Twitter account said Thursday.
Sergei Smirnov was imprisoned for 25 days Wednesday for retweeting a joke about his resemblance to a rock musician that appeared in an advertising image for a rally on behalf of Navalny. Prosecutors accused him of “provoking participation in an unapproved rally” with the retweet.
Smirnov was put in an eight-person cell with 27 other people at the Sakharova apprehension center outside Moscow, where “there is clearly insufficient vacuum,” said an article on his Twitter account, which is briefly being run by Mediazona personnel.
Independent monitors estimate that more than 10,000 individuals have actually been detained at recent pro-Navalny rallies throughout Russia, loading apprehension centers in Moscow to rupturing factor.
” Maybe they will be rearranged further, and now Smirnov and also several others merely have nowhere to lie down after all these hrs in cops cops, courts as well as terminals wagons. Actually, it’s just some sort of torment,” Smirnov’s account tweeted along with a picture showing detainees crowding the cell without face masks.
Smirnov’s account later tweeted that he had actually been moved to a four-person cell and offered a mattress, but that his phone has been removed. Hrs later, his account claimed he has actually been transferred to a third cell where he is the only passenger, claiming ” He fears it might imply that he’ll encounter certain issues.”
Video clip uploaded by Mediazona cofounder Pyotr Verzilov reveals Smirnov standing in the jam-packed cell, which is furnished with 4 bunk beds without mattresses as well as a squat bathroom as well as a discolored sink.
Various other video shared by Russian media revealed similar problems in women’s cells at the apprehension center.
At the same time, Moscow’s civils rights ombudswoman said Thursday that she saw vacant beds and no indicator of police truck lines when she went to the Sakharova detention facility the previous day.
A variety of Russian news outlets have actually required Smirnov’s release, including Kommersant, RBC, Forbes Russia, Novaya Gazeta, Meduza and Dozhd.