Anarchist From Krasnodar Sentenced

russia / ukraine / belarus | repression / prisoners | news report Tuesday July 05, 2005 17:40 by L. Akai - Anarchist Federation, Praga (Warsaw) cube at zigzag dot pl

Will Appeal Against Fabricated Case

Alexei Cherepanov from Krasnodar was set up by police in an ongoing history of state repression against anarchists in that city. In August 2004, the court decided that there was no real case against Alexei in light of mounting evidence that police had conspired to frame him and violated procedural norms in his case. But the state prosecutors brought him back to trial.

Now Alexei has been sentenced to 9 months in prison after a court case where the judge even openly accused him of living off the funds of "Jews and Masons". Journalists, who were important in publishing sympathetic articles and exposing the problems with the first trial against Alexei, were not allowed in the courtroom.

The case against Alexei, a drug case, was fabricated. The authorities of the region of Krasnodar are very often ultranationalist, anti-semites. The governor of the region, Kondratenko was a member of the ultranationalist, fascistic Russian National Unity and is known to go on anti-semitic and pro-war rampages in his speeches. There has been a long history of anarchist resistance to this ultranationalism which the authorities aim to quash with all their power. Alexei was a victim of these ultranationalists but had managed to show his innocence and the conspiracy against him by police during his first trial. However, the authorities were not pleased at the outcome, so they retried him in an apparently rigged, closed court.

Here is some old report on the case:
http://www.ainfos.ca/04/aug/ainfos00342.html
Also (for interest), photos made by pigs of a solidarity demo in Moscow:
http://media.militaryphotos.net/photos/Daily-Pics-August

No doubt the comrades from Russia will be renewing the campaign to free Alexei and we can send an update soon. The contact to Black Cross is abc_ufa@mail.ru or
a4k-moskva@avtonom.org