The FSB suspects St. Petersburg anarchists of creating a terrorist cell. Two spoke about torture, one went missing

The FSB is persecuting St. Petersburg anarchists and left-wing activists with the sanction of a court in one of the districts of Penza. There, a case is being considered regarding the participation of five people in a terrorist community (Part 2 of Article 205.4 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation; up to ten years in prison). The name of one of them is known - Arman Sagynbaev, a resident of St. Petersburg, who was detained in December 2017 and gave a confession. Two of the accused identify themselves as anarchists. It is unknown what exactly they are accused of, but, according to human rights activists from OVD-Info, the case is related to the persecution throughout Russia of supporters of oppositionist Vyacheslav Maltsev. He is accused of creating a terrorist community, fled Russia and received political asylum in the European Union.

The court in Penza issued a decree to carry out operational activities in St. Petersburg.

The FSB searched for and interrogated activists for a week. On January 25, a search took place in one of the apartments in the city center where anarchists lived. The search continued until almost three o'clock in the morning on January 26. All residents of the apartment were questioned. On the morning of January 26, one of them, Igor Shishkin, went for a walk with his dog, after which he was detained, and where he was was not known for two days. Only on the afternoon of January 27 was hebrought to court to choose a preventive measure, and journalists were not allowed into the courtroom. A Mediazona journalist who saw Shishkin in the court corridor said that he was “badly beaten.”

On the afternoon of January 27, Shishkin was arrested for two months on suspicion of participation in a terrorist community. Mediazona journalists were not allowed into the hall, and then detained .

On January 23, the wife of St. Petersburg anarchist Viktor Filinkov reported that her husband had gone missing. On this day, at about 20:00, he was driving to Pulkovo airport - he was going to fly to Kyiv via Minsk - and when he approached it, he stopped communicating. On January 25, it became known that Filinkov was detained at the airport by FSB operatives, and on the same day the court authorized his arrest for two months.

The joint press service of the courts of St. Petersburg reported that Filinkov and “other unidentified persons, sharing anarchist ideology, took part in a unit of the terrorist community for the purpose of carrying out terrorist activities, propaganda, justification and support of terrorism.” The press service added that Filinkov “admitted the suspicions against him.”

On January 26, Filinkov said that he was tortured with a stun gun and beaten. Members of the public monitoring commission for prisons came to see him in the pre-trial detention center. Fontanka quotes the report they drew up: Filinkov has numerous fresh burns from a stun gun on his chest and thigh, and a hematoma on his ankle.

Filinkov’s lawyer Viktor Cherkasov said that from Pulkovo his client was taken to a forest belt and forced to confess that he was a member of the terrorist organization “Network”, more precisely, in its St. Petersburg branch called “Field of Mars” (there is no information about this in open sources). groups with the same name). In addition, Filinkov, the lawyer says, was forced to testify against people whose names he had never heard. “In all my long struggle against police brutality, I have never seen such bodily injuries,” Cherkasov, who visited Filinkov, wrote on Facebook.

On January 27, industrial climber from St. Petersburg Ilya Kapustin told Mediazona that he was detained near his house, taken to the FSB and also tortured. They demanded that he admit that he was related to those arrested in Penza, although Kapustin had never been to this city. He simply knew one of the suspects. “When I didn’t know the answers to some questions, for example, when I didn’t understand who or what they were talking about, they shocked me with a stun gun in the groin area or on the side of my stomach. They shocked me so that I would say that this or that friend of mine was going to do something dangerous... At some point, one of them said that they could throw me out somewhere in the forest and break my legs - and I already began to wait this moment when everything will end, because they tortured me for so long that it was completely unbearable,” Kapustin told Mediazona. After interrogation he was released.

Andrey Sokolov