The organizer of an opposition forum was attacked

On Tuesday night in Samara, human rights activist Alexander Lashmankin, organizer of the opposition alter-globalization forum, which is to be held during the upcoming Russia-EU summit, was beaten. His colleagues call the attack a “political provocation,” but the police insist that “this is pure robbery” and the raiders will soon be caught. Yesterday, representatives of “The Other Russia” announced the detention of two organizers of the “March of Dissent” planned for May 18.

As Mr. Lashmankin himself told Kommersant, around midnight on Monday at the entrance of his house he was met by two men with baseball bats. “They hit me hard on the head, I fell to the ground and tried to cover myself with my hands,” the victim said. “They took away two phones and part of the forum leaflets, after which they hit me several more times and fled in a car.”

Mr. Lashmankin connects the attack with the upcoming Intergalactic Libertarian Forum in Samara on May 16-18, a congress of Russian alter-globalists, timed to coincide with the Russia-EU summit in the city. “On Monday we held a press conference and started posting leaflets. The authorities do not want any manifestation of civic activity during the days of the summit,” stated Mr. Lashmankin. Last week, employees of department “K” of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate seized a computer system unit from Alexander Lashmankin under the pretext of fighting unlicensed software. In addition, the human rights activist was ordered to leave the premises where the Samara anti-conscription group he represents is based. The mayor of Samara, Viktor Tarkhov, prohibited the allocation of a hall for the Intergalactic Libertarian Forum, at which it was planned to discuss interaction between Russia and the European Union.

According to the doctors, Mr. Lashmankin suffered a concussion and numerous bruises. “I wrote a statement to the police and told the investigator that I had been under surveillance all day,” Alexander Lashmankin told Kommersant. Moscow Helsinki Group observer Sergei Shimovolos, who arrived in Samara to investigate human rights violations, believes that the attack on Alexander Lashmankin is politically motivated. “Recently, Alexander has been actively involved in protecting the rights of detained activists of the Other Russia (the coalition plans to hold a ‘March of Dissent’ in Samara on May 18— Kommersant ),” he specified. “This is a provocation that should break the will of politically active citizens,” says one of the organizers of the march, Mikhail Gangan, who does not rule out that the intimidation action was carried out by the special services.

The Samara Internal Affairs Directorate told Kommersant that a criminal case has been opened into the attack under Article 162 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Robbery”), noting that the crime is not political, but criminal in nature. “This is pure robbery! The fact that the raiders were armed with bats does not mean anything,” the Central Internal Affairs Directorate assured Kommersant, promising that in the near future “the swindlers will be found.”

Already in the evening, representatives of “The Other Russia” announced that on Tuesday in Samara the organizers of the “March of Dissent” Mikhail Merkushin and Yuri Chervinchuk were detained. As Mikhail Gangan said, at the Sovetskaya metro station, two men handcuffed Mikhail Merkushin and pushed him into a car with tinted windows. “No charges or reasons for the arrest were given. We don’t even know if they were police officers,” said Mr. Gangan. Almost simultaneously, the organizers of the “March” lost contact with Yuri Chervinchuk (Kommersant wrote about his arrest on Sunday). “He tried to contact us, but someone interfered with him and shouted: ‘You won’t call anyone!’, after which his phone went off,” Anastasia Kurt-Adzhieva, a member of the March organizing committee, told Kommersant. Late in the evening it became known that Messrs. Merkushin and Chervinchuk were detained by the police to establish their identities. After their fingerprints were taken, they were released.

Pavel Kommersant-Sedakov, Samara

Samara took up baseball bats