Alexey Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, walks with protesters at a rally in Moscow, Russia, on Saturday, February 29, 2019. The meeting marked five years since the murder of politician Boris Nemtsov.
Andrey Rudakov | Bloomberg via Getty Images
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was detained at an airport in Moscow on Sunday after returning from Germany, the prison said.
The prison service said he was being held for multiple violations of parole and the terms of a suspended prison sentence and would be held until a court makes a decision on his case.
Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent and determined enemy, had spent the past five months in Germany recovering from a nervous attack he blamed on the Kremlin. Navalny decided to leave Berlin of his own free will and was apparently under no pressure to leave Germany.
The prison service announced this after the flight with Navalny landed in the Russian capital, although at a different airport than planned. It was a possible attempt to outsmart journalists and supporters who wanted to see Navalny’s return.
The Russian prison service issued an arrest warrant last week, saying he had violated the terms of suspended sentence he received after a conviction for embezzlement in 2014. transform punishment into real punishment.
After boarding the flight to Moscow in Berlin on Sunday, Navalny said of the prospect of arrest: “It’s impossible; I am an innocent man.”
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied a role in the poisoning of the opposition leader.
Navalny supporters and journalists had come to Vnukovo Airport in Moscow, where the plane was to land, but it eventually landed at Sheremetyevo Airport, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) away. There was no direct explanation for the flight diversion.
The OVD Info group, which oversees political arrests, said at least 37 people have been arrested at Vnukovo airport, although their links were not immediately apparent.
Vnukovo banned journalists from working in the terminal, saying in a statement last week that the move was due to epidemiological concerns. The airport also blocked access to the international arrivals hall.
Police vehicles were outside the terminal on Sunday.
The independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and the opposition social media reported Sunday that several Navalny supporters in St. Petersburg had been removed from trains to Moscow or prevented from boarding late Saturday and early Sunday, including the coordinator of his staff. for the region of Russia. second largest city.
Navalny fell into a coma on August 20 on a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow. Two days later he was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to a hospital in Berlin.
Labs in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, showed he was exposed to a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent.
Russian authorities insisted that the doctors treating Navalny in Siberia before he was flown to Germany found no trace of poison and challenged German officials to provide evidence of his poisoning. They declined to open a full-fledged criminal investigation, citing a lack of evidence that Navalny had been poisoned.
Last month, Navalny released the recording of a phone call he made to a man he described as an alleged member of a group of Federal Security Service, or FSB officers, who supposedly poisoned him in August and then tried to hide it. up. The FSB dismissed the recording as a fake.
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