Alexey Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition, goes with the protesters during a rally in Moscow, Russia, on Saturday, February 29, 2019. The rally marked five years since the assassination of politician Boris Nemtsov.
Andrey Rudakov | Bloomberg via Getty Images
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was detained at an airport in Moscow after returning from Germany on Sunday, the prison service said.
The penitentiary service said he was detained for multiple violations of parole and a suspended prison sentence and will be held in custody until a court rules on his case.
Navalny, who is the most prominent and determined enemy of President Vladimir Putin, has spent the past five months in Germany recovering from a nervous breakdown he blamed on the Kremlin. Navalny decided to leave Berlin of his own free will and was not under any apparent pressure to leave Germany.
The penitentiary service made the announcement after the Navalny flight landed in the Russian capital, albeit at a different airport than planned. It was a possible attempt to fool journalists and supporters who wanted to witness Navalny’s return.
The Russian penitentiary service issued an arrest warrant last week, saying it had violated the conditions for suspending the sentence it received for a 2014 conviction for embezzlement. The penitentiary service asked a Moscow court to turn Navalny’s 3-and-a-half-year suspended sentence into a real one.
After boarding a Moscow flight to Berlin on Sunday, Navalny said of the prospect of arrest: “It’s impossible; I’m an innocent man.”
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied a role in poisoning the opposition leader.
Navalny’s supporters and journalists had come to Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, where the plane was scheduled to land, but arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport, about 40 kilometers away. There was no immediate explanation for the flight diversion.
The OVD-Info group, which monitors political arrests, said at least 37 people had been arrested at Vnukovo airport, although their affiliations were not immediately clear.
Vnukovo has banned journalists from working inside the terminal, saying in a statement last week that the move was due to epidemiological concerns. The airport also blocked access to the international arrivals area.
The vehicles owned by the police were in front of the terminal on Sunday.
Independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and opposition social media reported on Sunday that several Navalny supporters in St. Petersburg had been removed from trains to Moscow or prevented from boarding late Saturday and early Sunday, including its staff coordinator for the Russian region. the second largest city.
Navalny fell into a coma while on a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20. He was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to a hospital in Berlin two days later.
Laboratories in Germany, France and Sweden, as well as tests carried out by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, have established that he was exposed to a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent.
Russian authorities have insisted that doctors who treated Navalny in Siberia before he was flown to Germany found no signs of poison and challenged German officials to provide evidence of his poisoning. They refused to open a full-fledged criminal investigation, citing a lack of evidence that Navalny had been poisoned.
Last month, Navalny launched a phone call he said he addressed to a man he described as an alleged member of a group of Federal Security Service or FSB officers, who poisoned him in August and then tried to cover it up. The FSB rejected the registration as false.
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