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Weekly updates


After commencing a hunger strike which left her malnourished and detained in the prison hospital, Pussy Riot‘s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova went missing on October 20 from Colony 14 in Mordavia where she was serving her two-year sentence for participating in a punk-protest against president Vladimir Putin’s rule.

The hunger strike was in protest of human rights violations and  “slavery-like” conditions in the Russian prison along with allegations that prison officials threatened her with death. Now missing for over two weeks, Tolokonnikova’s husband Peter Verzilov has heard from a source within the prison administration that she is being transferred to Colony 50 in Krasnoyarsk in the heart of Siberia, as punishment.

Under Russian law relatives are to be notified within 10 days as to the whereabouts of the imprisoned, but legal loopholes mean it could be weeks before any concrete information is released. Vladimir Lukin of the Russian human rights ombudsman confirms that Nadezhda is in transit:

“At the request of a number of human rights activists I contacted the leadership of the Federal Penitentiary Service and asked them about the fate of the prisoner Tolokonnikova. I was told that she was alight, that she is in transit, moving to a new place of residence, an institution where she will serve the rest of her sentence.”

Arrested in August of 2012 with bandmates Mariya Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich for Pussy Riot’s performance in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral. Nadezhda and Mariya are still serving two-year sentences whilst Yekaterina was released on a suspended sentence. Meanwhile a one-person picket (which is allowed under Russia’s strict no protest laws) is on its fourth day outside Moscow’s penitentiary HQ and will continue until they hear word from Nadezhda.

[Via.]