The court extended the arrest of a Communist Party deputy accused of showing a dildo to a child

A court in Vladivostok extended the detention of Communist Party member Artem Samsonov by two months. This was reported in the politician’s Telegram channel.

The defense applied for house arrest and bail of three million rubles, but the court rejected the requests.

Samsonov is accused of violent acts of a sexual nature against a person under fourteen years of age (clause “b”, part 4 of article 132 of the Criminal Code). According to the investigation, the deputy, “while on the territory of the recreation center <...> while communicating with an 11-year-old child, showed him an object of an intimate nature and conveyed to him information about its purpose.” The politician is charged with an episode when he allegedly showed an 11-year-old boy a dildo.

Samsonov himself claims that he is being persecuted for political reasons. “The investigation has already found out that the boy had never seen me before, just like I had never seen him. Billings based on the location of our phones never overlapped. And I was denied an independent polygraph examination. I demand a polygraph (lie detector) examination of my testimony. I am being persecuted because I am a deputy from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. I am being kept in custody so that I cannot take part in meetings of the Legislative Assembly of the Primorsky Territory. Despite this, even from the pre-trial detention center I send parliamentary requests and participate in meetings of my committee,” he wrote in his Telegram channel.

On November 17, security forces came to Samsonov with a search , after which he was placed in a temporary detention center. On November 19, by decision of the Frunzensky District Court in Vladivostok, the deputy was sent to a pre-trial detention center.

• Samsonov's lawyer Alexey Kletskin noted that the case file does not speak of a demonstration and conversation with a minor, but that the deputy allegedly took out an “object” during a conversation with other adults and put it on the table, and somewhere in the distance there was a minor .
• On the day of the search, information appeared that Vladivostok resident Irina Safonova wrote an appeal to the president, complaining about Samsonov’s various actions. The document says that, among other things, the deputy “persistently and aggressively” campaigned for her and her friends to “join Navalny’s movement.” In addition, the deputy allegedly walked around the tent camp naked, staged “drunken brawls and pogroms,” and “gratuitously beat” her 26-year-old son and his fellow student.