A dozen supporters of Alexei Navalny, including doctors, were arrested Tuesday by the Russian police in front of his penal colony where they had gone to demand information on the state of the opponent, sick and on hunger strike.
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Worried about the health of the main critic of the Kremlin, who according to his lawyer has lost five kilos since he stopped eating on March 31, his supporters were found at the end of the morning in front of Camp No.2 in Pokrov , 100 km east of Moscow.
They asked to see his director and those responsible for monitoring Mr. Navalny’s health, the latter having said that he suffered from a fever, a strong cough and back pain.
Unsurprisingly, the authorities did not comply with their request.
In the middle of the afternoon, three police vans arrived to pick up the protesters, including Anastassia Vassilieva, an opposition activist and Alexey Navalny’s personal doctor, noted an AFP journalist.
Dozens of police officers in the vans took doctors in white coats and others, including at least one journalist. According to local police, nine people were arrested for “disturbing public order”.
In the evening, Ms Vassilieva was released, according to her team.
The arrested journalist also announced on Twitter that he was released a few hours after his arrest.
According to information from pro-Kremlin Izvestia news outlet on Monday evening, Mr. Navalny was transferred to a medical unit after his condition worsened, namely the onset of fever and cough.
No official confirmation has been released, however.
According to Mr. Navalny’s lawyer, Olga Mikhaïlova, the prison has only one orderly and no doctor. She said Monday that her client weighed 80 kilograms, against 93 when he arrived in this prison and 85 at the start of his hunger strike.
“Unsanitary conditions and tuberculosis”
Concerns about the 44-year-old anti-corruption activist are all the greater because he narrowly survived a nerve agent Novichok poisoning last year that had plunged him into a coma. He accuses the Kremlin, which denies any responsibility.
Returned to Russia in January after five months of convalescence in Germany, he was immediately arrested and sentenced to two and a half years in prison for an old case of fraud which he considers political.
Since his arrival at Pokrov penitentiary, which is said to be one of the toughest in Russia, he accuses his guards of “torturing” him, in particular by deprivation of sleep.
Alexeï Navalny speaks regularly on social networks without knowing how his messages come out of the penitentiary. He said on Monday that an inmate in his barracks had been hospitalized for tuberculosis, the third in a few weeks.
“Each prisoner prays to God not to end up here, because inside, it is unsanitary, tuberculosis and lack of medicine,” he wrote.
Since returning to Russia, his supporters have faced increased repression.
Before her arrest on Tuesday, Anastassia Vassilieva, the director of the Alliance of Doctors, a union close to the opposition and in the crosshairs of the authorities, had said she wanted “to understand what is happening” in the Pokrov camp.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov, for his part, ruled that Mr. Navalny should not benefit from “special conditions”, the prison services having assured at the end of March that he was receiving “all the necessary medical assistance”.
His wife, Yulia Navalnaïa, for her part published on Instagram a letter from the director of the penal colony in which he wrote to her that he could not hospitalize the opponent, because the prison administration does not have his identity documents.
“Mr. Director, don’t forget that if the worst happens to Alexeï, his death will be on your conscience and that of Putin”, she said in comment: “But your Putin will then stab you in the back and make you wear the hat ”.