Pussy Riot musician in penal colony in Siberia
(ANSA) – Moscow, November 12 – Jailed Pussy Riot punk musician Nadezdha (Nadia) Tolokonnikova has arrived at a penal colony in eastern Siberia to finish serving her jail term for performing a protest song against Russian President Vladimir Putin, the country’s human rights commissioner said Tuesday.
The young leader of the punk band has complained of conditions at the colony in the region of Krasnoyarsk, nearly 4,400 kilometres from Moscow, where she was previously held.
Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s human rights commissioner, said the Siberian site was chosen to help her with her “resocialization”.
Her husband Piotr Verzilov had said that he had no news of Tolokonnikova for three weeks while she was being transferred to the Siberian camp.
Band members were convicted in August 2012 of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred and sentenced to two years in jail after staging an allegedly blasphemous protest against Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral in February 2012.
One of the three band members was released on probation in October 2012.
The jail sentence raised a chorus of international criticism with top-level diplomats describing it as disproportionate and expressing concern about the conditions in which the women would be imprisoned.
The band’s cause has been publicly endorsed by musicians including Madonna, Bjork, Peter Gabriel and Green Day.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev has said he believed the women should not have been sent to jail.