Pussy Riot Freed
December 23, 2013 by staff
P**y Riot Freed, Two members of the brash Russian punk band P**y Riot were released from prison Monday under a new amnesty law, but remained defiant, charging the Kremlin with mounting a public relations stunt to repair its human rights image in advance of the Winter Olympics in Sochi in February.
Maria Alekhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were serving a two-year sentence for hooliganism motivated by religious hatred for staging a raucous, profanity-laced performance at Moscow’s main cathedral in March 2012.
A third member, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was released earlier on a suspended sentence.
The band members said their 2012 protest, which was videotaped and posted on YouTube, was aimed at raising concern about increasingly close ties between the state and the church.
Alekhina, 25, was freed in Nizhny Novgorod and Tolokonnikova, 24, was released from a prison hospital in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. Both were scheduled for release in March, but qualified under the new amnesty bill because they have young children.
The law, passed by the Russian parliament last week, opens the way for the release of thousands of inmates. Charges against 30 people arrested while taking part in a Greenpeace protest at a Russian Arctic offshore oil rig may also be dropped later this week under the law, the BBC reports.
On Friday, President Vladimir Putin pardoned Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon and once Russia’s richest man, who spent a decade in prison on fraud and tax evasion charges after challenging Putin’s power.
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