50-YEAR-OLD
JEHOVAH'S
WITNESS TAKEN INTO CUSTODY IN SEVERSK
Za
prava cheloveka, 8
September 2020
The
Seversk city
court of Tomsk oblast ordered to take into custody the
fifty-year-old Jehovah's
Witness (the organization is considered extremist in the R.F.)
Evgeny Korotun.
As the website of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia reports, the
believer was taken
into custody at yesterday's judicial session, of which Evgeny
Korotun had been
warned all of a half hour before the start of the hearings. The
man was sent to
SIZO-1 in Tomsk.
The
judge made this
decision because he took into account that Evgeny Korotun has a
passport for
foreign travel so he "may abscond from the investigation." In
addition, the believer is accused of putting pressure on
witnesses, of which no
evidence was presented.
We
recall: Evgeny
Korotun is accused of organizing an extremist association (part
1, article
282.2 of CC RF). A criminal case was opened by A. Vyshgorodtsev,
an
investigator for especially serious cases of the investigation
department for
the closed city of Seversk of the Investigative Committee of the
R.F. for Tomsk
oblast. The man was arrested on 14 July 2020 during searches in
homes of
Jehovah's Witnesses from Seversk. After that, the believer was
placed in a
holding cell for a night and then placed under house arrest.
On the
same day,
searches were conducted also in four homes of Jehovah's
Witnesses. Ten persons
were taken to the investigation department for interrogation.
Electronic
equipment, religious literature, wi-fi routers, video cameras,
photographs,
postcards, bank cards, passports for foreign travel, and even
volumes of Victor
Hugo and Lev Tolstoy were confiscated from the believers.
Earlier
in Tomsk
oblast, Jehovah's Witness Sergei Klimov was sentenced to six
years
incarceration. At the present time he is in corrective colony
No. 8 of
Astrakhan oblast. (tr. by PDS, posted 9 September 2020)
Background article on Klimov:
Jehovah's Witness loses first round of
appeal against conviction
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