Sergei Mitrokhin: criminal case against mother of three children Svetlana Davydova is absurd
Press release, 30.01.2015
YABLOKO leader Sergei Mitrokhin forwarded an application to head of the Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexander Bortnikov demanding to publish information on the course of the investigation of the criminal case against Svetlana Davydova who is accused of treason and is kept in prison and soften the imposed pre-trail restraint measure.
Mother of seven children Svetlana Davydova is held in Moscow’s Lefortovo pre-trial detention facility.
According to the Kommersant newspaper, Davydova is accused of reporting the Ukrainian Embassy about a phone conversation she had heard on a shuttle bus. It was clear from what a man on the bus was saying on the mobile phone that he was a military. The man was saying that he and his comrades-in-arms “were being sent in small groups and certainly in civilian clothes to Moscow, and from there on they would be sent further”. Svetlana Davydova decided that the military would be sent to Donetsk.
“If the information form Kommersant is credible, then the criminal case is absurd, and the decision to detain a mother of seven children is cynical and unlawful. Retelling of a conversation one could have heard in a bus can not fall under Article 275 of the Criminal Code [treason of the state], even with vague wordings introduced into this article in 2009 and 2012, ” Sergei Mitrokhin said.
A Smolensk woman faces charges of high treason after she phoned Ukrainian diplomats to warn them that Russian troops may be en route to their country, newspaper Kommersant reported Thursday.
According to Gorlov [husband] , she had overheard a Russian soldier from the local military base telling someone by phone on a bus that he was being sent on a mission. Fearing that Russian soldiers were being deployed to eastern Ukraine, she informed the Ukrainian Embassy of what she had heard.
Months later, on Jan. 21, investigators from the Federal Security Service, or FSB, showed up at her home, conducted a raid and took her into custody, Gorlov said in comments carried by Kommersant.
Posted: February 2nd, 2015 under Human Rights.