Russian opposition leader, Alexey Navalny, revealed that Russian police raided the home of an activist and confiscated some of her personal and family items. The activist, Lyubov Sobol, has been accused of threatening an official of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), Konstantin Kudryavtsev, as confirmed by the country’s Investigative Committee.
“At 7 am on Friday, the police raided Sobol’s home, since about 10 minutes after they arrived, we have not been able to reach her or access the security cameras in the apartment,” Navalny’s team wrote in a tweet on Friday.
The committee, which is the main investigative agency in Russia, confirmed that a criminal probe was opened to check the activities of Sobol after she paid a visit to Kudryavtsev to allegedly threaten the FSB personal for his alleged involvement in the poisoning of Navalny. Navalny’s team stated however that Sobol only visited Kudryavtsev and posed no threat whatsoever to the FSB officer.
Navalny had earlier released the detail of a phone call between the opposition leader and Kudryavtsev. During the call, Navalny was able to successfully trick Kudryavtsev to describe how the FSB had tried to kill Navalny by putting Novichok, a rare nerve agent, in his underwear. The opposition leader had fallen ill during a local flight and almost lost his life, the Guardian reports.
On Monday, after the detail of the phone call was made public, Sobol paid Kudryavtsev a visit. She succeeded in pressing his doorbell before the police immediately surrounded the apartment and a woman, who later identified herself to be Kudryavtsev’s mother, approached Sobol and her team. Sobol, who Navalny stated had gone to the apartment to confront Kudryavtsev about his part in the attempted murder of Navalny, was taken into detention and later released on Tuesday.
The officers then came to her house on Friday, confiscated the family’s phones and computers, and went away with Sobol, according to Navalny’s tweet. Head of the opposition leader’s Anti-Corruption Fund, Ivan Zhdanov, tweeted that the Investigative Committee was accusing Sobol of trespassing when the only thing she did was press the agent’s doorbell. According to Zhdanov, the probe against Sobol states that she had the intention to “use violence or threaten to employ it”.
According to reports, a team of six to ten FSB agents had secretly followed Navalny for over three years before they finally succeeded in poisoning him in August. Navalny had to be flown to Germany to completely neutralize the effects of the nerve agent in his system. Navalny has stated that the Russian government was involved in the poisoning.
Source: cnn.com
