Navalny decries ‘mockery of justice’ in airport arrest
Questions how court session can be held inside police station
Moscow, Jan. 18: Russian Opposition leader Alexei Navalny said on Monday his treatment was beyond a “mockery of justice” as he was brought before a hastily organised court a day after his dramatic airport arrest.
With calls growing in the West for Navalny’s release, he was brought into a courtroom set up at a police station in Khimki on the outskirts of Moscow where he was taken following his detention on Sunday night.
Police seized Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent opponent, at a border control post at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport less than an hour after he returned to Russia from Germany for the first time since he was poisoned with a nerve agent in August.
In a video posted by his team from inside the hearing, an incredulous Navalny said he did not understand how a court session could take place at a police station and why no one had been notified until the last minute. “I’ve seen a lot of mockery of justice, but the old man in the bunker (Putin) is so afraid that they have blatantly torn up and thrown away”
● IN A video posted by his team from inside the hearing, an incredulous Navalny said he did not understand how a court session could take place at a police station and why no one had been notified until the last minute.
Russia’s criminal
Navalny said.
“This is ultimate
In another video, Navalny called for the hearing to be open to all journalists, after only pro-Kremlin media were allowed to attend.
“I demand that this procedure be as open as possible, so that all media have the opportunity to observe the amazing absurdity of what is happening here,” he said. About 100 people, mostly journalists, had gathered in the snow outside the police station and several police vans were waiting nearby with their engines running.
Russia’s FSIN prison service said on Sunday that it had detained Navalny, 44, for violating the terms of a suspended sentence he was given in 2014, on fraud charges he says were politically motivated. —
code,
lawlessness.”