The head of the Karelian Memorial was left under arrest

The Supreme Court of Karelia has left under arrest the historian and head of the local Memorial Human Rights Center, Yuri Dmitriev, who is accused of sexually assaulting his adopted daughter. This was reported by Interfax with reference to the lawyer Viktor Anufriev.

Yuri Dmitriev was arrested on June 28, on the same day he was charged with sexual assault against a person under the age of 14 (part 4 of article 132 of the Criminal Code). According to the lawyer, the accusation is based on the conversations of a grandmother, a psychologist and an investigator with the adopted daughter of a human rights activist. Anufriev believes that the psychologist was in touch with the investigator and became a mechanism for putting pressure on the child.

• Previously, the historian was accused of making pornographic photographs with the participation of his adopted daughter (Article 242.2 of the Criminal Code) and of “lewd acts” (Article 135 of the Criminal Code). On April 5, the city court acquitted the historian under these articles. Dmitriev was sentenced to two and a half years of restraint of liberty under article 222 of the Criminal Code (illegal possession of weapons): during the inspection of the apartment in December 2016, fragments of hunting weapons were confiscated from him.
• On April 13, Prosecutor Yelena Askerova appealed against the acquittal. In June, the court overturned both the acquittal in the child pornography case and the guilty verdict in the weapons possession case.
• At the end of December 2017, a re-examination of nine images found by security forces on the historian's computer disproved allegations of their pornographic nature. And the results of the medical examination, announced at the meeting of the Petrozavodsk city court on February 27, confirmed the fact that Dmitriev is healthy and is not a pedophile.
• At the same time, the man was released from the pre-trial detention center on bail. According to the defendant and his lawyers, the controversial photographs were taken for medical purposes and were intended for reporting before custody.
• Yuri Dmitriev is a well-known Karelian local historian, historian and human rights activist, known for finding a mass grave of victims of Stalinist repressions in the town of Sandormokh in 1997.