The court in St. Petersburg softened the preventive measure for an anarchist accused of justifying terrorism

On December 23, the St. Petersburg City Court softened the preventive measure for anarchist, anti-fascist and LGBT activist Alexander Merkulov (Pezhich), accused of justifying terrorism on the Internet (Part 2 of Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code). This is reported by the telegram channel of Merkulov’s support group.

The appeal court allowed Merkulov to take daily walks lasting up to two hours.

The city court also considered the defense’s appeal against the Oktyabrsky District Court’s ruling recognizing the search in Merkulov’s house as legal. The court left the lower court's decision unchanged. Most likely, we are talking about an appeal of the district court’s decision, which was made after the search: as a general rule, a search can only be carried out with the sanction of the court. In exceptional cases, the investigation may not notify the court of plans for a search, but within three days after the search it must apply to the court so that it can issue a ruling recognizing the search as legal.

According to investigators, from November 1, 2018 to October 31, 2019, Alexander Merkulov published posts on VKontakte under the pseudonym Aleksandr Pejic about 17-year-old anarchist Mikhail Zhlobitsky, who detonated a bomb in the building of the Arkhangelsk FSB Directorate. Experts found in the posts “signs of justification for the actions” of the anarchist.

After the court decision on December 1, which changed Merkulov’s preventive measure to house arrest, the anarchist was kept in a pre-trial detention center for about a day: the detention center employees allegedly waited for them to receive documents from the court.

• Alexander Merkulov was sent into custody at the beginning of July 2020. On October 5, the court extended his detention in the pre-trial detention center until November 6, and in November the preventive measure was extended again until December 6. On October 28, it became known that Merkulov was transferred from the pre-trial detention center to a psychiatric hospital for examination.
• On the morning of October 31, 2018, in the FSB building in Arkhangelsk, 17-year-old local resident Mikhail Zhlobitsky detonated a bomb. Three employees were injured, the young man himself died. A few minutes before the explosion, a message about the attack appeared in the telegram open chat of “Rebel Rebel”. Law enforcement officers opened a criminal case for a terrorist attack.
• There are at least 21 known criminal cases of “justification of terrorism” initiated in the wake of the explosion in the Arkhangelsk FSB Directorate: The case of Evgeniy Gavrilov ; the case of Svetlana Prokopyeva ; the case of Ivan Lyubshin ; the case ofAlexey Shibanov ; the case of Nadezhda Belova ; the case of Vyacheslav Lukichev ; the case of Lyudmila Stech ; the case of Ekaterina Muranova ; the case of Konstantin Vasilyanov ; the case of Alexander Kovalenko ; the case of Galina Gorina ; the case of Pavel Zlomnov ; the case of Alexander Dovydenkov ; case of Nadezhda Romasenko; the case of Alexander Sokolov ; the case of Alexander Merkulov ; the caseof Sergei Arbuzov ; the case of Oleg Nemtsev ; case of a resident of Omsk (name and surname unknown); the case of Sergei Sizykh ; case of Valery Klimenchenko .