Jailed Russian Artist Says Guards Cracked Rib in Beating
Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky, who is on trial for setting fire to the security service headquarters in a protest, said Tuesday that guards convoying him from court had beaten him, cracking his rib.
"As I write these lines, my knee has been injured, I have a cracked rib and internal bruising.
"Every breath gives me pain," Pavlensky said in a handwritten letter published on Facebook by his partner Oksana Shalygina which blamed the assault on "convoy guards of the Moscow City Court."
Pavlensky faces up to three years in prison for dousing the door of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, with gasoline and setting it on fire in November 2015 in a performance he called "Threat".
The first full hearing in Pavlensky's trial, in which he is accused of damaging a cultural heritage site, will be held Wednesday at Moscow's Meshchansky district court.
Pavlensky's lawyer, Dmitry Dinze, confirmed the artist's injuries to AFP, saying the beating occurred on Monday when his client was being taken back to prison after a court hearing.
Dinze said that Pavlensky was attacked by a single guard and that the lawyers would try to identify him.
A spokeswoman for Moscow City Court, Ulyana Solopova, told Russian news agencies the court was not responsible for the transfer of defendants back to detention centres.
Pavlensky is currently being held in Moscow's Medvedkovo prison. During the investigation, he spent a month in a psychiatric hospital having tests of his sanity, which found he was mentally capable.
The 32-year-old activist is better known for nailing his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square in November 2013 and for cutting off his earlobe in another protest a year later.
He is also currently on trial for a Saint Petersburg performance called "Freedom" in which he set fire to tyres in 2014 in a nod to the pro-Western rallies in Kiev.
Pavlensky will be awarded the Vaclav Havel international prize "for creative dissent" next week.
In a separate incident Tuesday, firebrand opposition leader Alexei Navalny said he and his supporters were punched and kicked by Cossack militia in the southern Russian city of Anapa.
Navalny, a charismatic lawyer and corruption whistleblower who has investigated officials close to President Vladimir Putin, wrote on Twitter that some 30 people had taken part in the attack.
"The organisers, of course, are the authorities," he wrote.
Source: Agence France Presse
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