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| Russian President Vladimir Putin |
MOSCOW, Sept 9 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Bureau (FSB), has accused five men of sabotaging a gas pipeline on the annexed Crimean Peninsula.
The FSB, the successor to the Soviet KGB, claimed that Ukrainian military intelligence procured an explosive device and promised a cash reward of 2,000 dollars to the men to plant it.
All five men being detained are Crimean Tatars, a Turkic ethnic minority group indigenous to Crimea. Among those arrested was Nariman Dzhelyal, vice chairperson of the Mejlis, the Crimean Tatar representative body, which was banned by Russia in 2016.
The five men now face a lengthy prison sentence if found guilty, which is virtually an inevitability in the tightly controlled Russian legal system, where defendants are almost never found to be innocent.
The gas pipeline, near the Crimean capital of Simferopol, was damaged in August. The arrest of the five men sparked demonstrations in which some 50 more Crimean Tatars were taken into police custody, according to sources in Kiev.
In Ukraine, the arrest was condemned as an arbitrary move made against opponents of the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry spoke of “repression” aimed at “intimidating representatives of the Crimean Tatar people and ousting them from the temporarily occupied peninsula.” — NNN-AGENCIES
