‘Coup plotters’ trained abroad
MOSCOW, Dec 1, (Agencies): Russian investigators said they had conclusive proof that the opposition wanted to organise unrest in the country and even underwent training abroad to learn how to stage a coup.
In an unusual television special broadcast Friday evening, the spokesman of the powerful Investigative Committee said that leftist activists currently arrested in Moscow “prepared very carefully for the mass riots.”
“This preparation was happening outside of Russia,” spokesman Vladimir Markin told the Rossiya channel. “They were trained abroad in methods of mass unrest to be used with the goal of regime change, using the example of ‘orange revolutions’.”
Russia charged three people last month with preparing for mass riots in Russia, including 39-yearold Leonid Razvozzhayev, who told rights activists that he was forced to pen a confession after being kidnapped from Ukraine and terrorised for several days.
Despite Razvozzhayev’s retraction of the confession, Russia has “irrefutable evidence” of his and two other activists’ involvement in plotting unrest, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.
The television programme that ran Markin’s interview also showed a young woman who claimed she was Razvozzhayev’s lover and knew that he and other accused activists — Left Front movement leader Sergei Udaltsov and Udaltsov’s assistant Konstantin Lebedev — met Georgian MP Givi Targamadze, as the investigation claims.
“The money started appearing in spring and the beginning of summer,” the woman, Samira Bader, said on the programme, which alleged that Razvozzhayev suddenly became rich with his foreign sponsor’s cash.
The high-profile investigation was launched after a pro-Kremlin channel aired a film alleging the accused trio plotted a violent coup together with Targamadze’s money and expertise in Georgia’s prowestern Rose Revolution of 2003.
Targamadze and Udaltsov, who has not yet been arrested, have vehemently denied the film’s claims.
Vladimir Putin is in good health, his chief of staff said on Friday after Japanese media said Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda had postponed a visit to Moscow next month because the Russian president had a health problem.
A former KGB officer who enjoys vast authority in Russia, Putin has long cultivated a toughguy image, and health issues could damage that. His condition though has been questioned in some media since he was seen limping at a summit in September.
Three Russian government sources told Reuters late in October that Putin, who began a six-year term in May and turned 60 last month, was suffering from back trouble, but the Kremlin has dismissed talk that he had a serious back problem. Putin’s health troubles stem from a recent judo bout, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said this week.
Then on Friday Japanese news agencies Kyodo and Jiji reported that Prime Minister Noda talked about the delay of a visit planned for December in a meeting with municipal officials on the northern island of Hokkaido.
The head of the investment fund at the centre of the Magnitsky fraud scandal said Friday staff had received death threats, as British police probed the unexplained death of a Russian involved in the case.
The chief executive of investment fund Hermitage Capital, William Browder, would not say whether he believed that Alexander Perepilichnyy, 44, who died on November 10 near his home in Surrey outside London, had been murdered.
But he confirmed the Russian businessman had since 2010 been passing evidence to Hermitage of the involvement of Russian officials in a scheme to embezzle $230 million (177 million euros) by obtaining false tax returns on payments made by the fund.
Retraction