Russian investigators on Friday formally charged opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov with plotting mass disorder in connection with a controversial probe widely seen as another effort by Kremlin to suppress dissent.
Udaltsov was released after being charged by Russia's Investigative Committee (SK), a police agency like the FBI in the US. He faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of the charges. He has been ordered to stay in Moscow pending further investigation.
The SK charged Udaltsov, leader of the radical Left Front movement, after questioning him about a hidden-camera footage broadcast by the pro-Kremlin NTV channel earlier this month. The grainy footage apparently showed Udaltsov conspiring with two other Left Front opposition activists and a Georgian politician to organize mass disorder in Russia.
NTV journalist Alexei Malkin has since told a Moscow court that an "unknown Georgian" gave him a disc containing the footage as he was walking down the street. The SK has cited the video footage as evidence against the three opposition activists.
The two other Left Front members featured in the NTV footage, namely Leonid Razvozzhayev and Konstantin Lebedev, have already been arrested. Razvozzhaev has since claimed that he confessed to the charges after being kidnapped in Kiev, transferred to Moscow and tortured for two days.
All the three activists face long prison terms if convicted of the charges. The insist that the footage is fake, claiming that the charges pressed against them are part of the Russian government's latest efforts at curbing dissent.
Razvozzhayev told human rights activists who visited him at Moscow's Lefortovo prison on Tuesday that he was abducted by masked men in Kiev as he was leaving the local office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in the Ukrainian capital after seeking advice about political asylum.
Razvozzhayev said he was driven across the Russia-Ukraine border by his abductors, who turned out to be Russian intelligence agents. The activist said he was tortured by the Russian intelligence agents and was forced to sign a ten-page confession admitting the charges of plotting mass disorder in Russia.
Nevertheless, officials at the SK denied Razvozzhayev's claims, insisting that the activist had turned himself in voluntarily three days after an arrest warrant was issued against him. They said he later confessed to his involvement in the plot.
Ukrainian foreign ministry has so far refused to make any official comments about Razvozzhayev's alleged abduction. Nevertheless, media agencies quoted an interior ministry spokesman as saying that "foreign special services," most likely Russian, might have been involved in the activist's abduction. He added that Ukrainian authorities were unlikely to take any action on the issue as "criminals" were not involved in the incident.
The United States has officially expressed concerns regarding Razvozzhayev's case to Moscow on Thursday, and urged the Russian government to investigate claims made by the activist that he was tortured into making the confession.
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