Tech export case detainees pressed to admit guilt - Moscow

A Houston court in Texas has turned down the detainees` appeal to place them under home arrest. All four – Alexander Fishchenko, Viktoria Klebanova, Alexander Posobilov, and Anastasiya Dyatlova hold dual Russian-US citizenship. The court ruled that they all will remain in custody not to be able to escape justice and destroy the evidence. Moscow says the excuses are ‘fat-fetched’ and believes that the detained Russians are facing pressure to admit guilt on their own free will. 

Political analyst Igor Shatrov is sure that the case is politically biased: "Secret services always watch over a country’s political interests. I view this situation not as a separate case but as a special mechanism using psychological pressure on Russia in order to tell it its place on international scene, not the one it actually deserves.” 

Perhaps, to make a political context of the case more evident, the detained women were not just put behind bars but also deprived of basic daily comfort: they sleep on the floor as there are no free beds inside their cell, and they are barred from using the money their families transferred to their prison accounts and thus cannot buy a tooth brush, tooth paste and hair shampoo. 

Lawyer Alexander Treschev says that such treatment of the detainees is a grave violation. "If this all is true, Russian consulate officials should report this to the police and sue those involved in maltreatment.” 

In early October eight people, some of them holding Russian citizenship, were detained on charged of illegal exports of high technology to Russia. The prosecution insists that microelectronic details allegedly exported by Russians could have been supplied to the Russian intelligence. Russians deny the allegations. The first hearings into the case are scheduled to take place in a New York on October 17.

 

Russian nationals detained in the US for reportedly illegally exporting high-tech microelectronics to Russia are being subjected to psychological pressure to confess their involvement in an alleged illegal activity, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

The Ministry demanded that the US to cease putting "psychological and moral pressure” on the detainees to extract a confession.

Denis Galeev, the husband of the suspect Anastasia Dyatlova, told RIA-Novosti news agency that his wife was allowed to call him on Friday for the first time since her arrest.

"She told me all three of them are sleeping on the floor because their cell is overcrowded and getting a plank bed is only possible if someone of the prisoners is released or transferred,”Galeev said.

He also claimed that his wife is being denied money he sent her to buy hygiene products like a toothbrush, toothpaste and shampoo.

On Friday, the Houston court denied bail to the three detained women: Dyatlova, 38, and Viktoriya Klebanova, 37 – both of whom have dual Russian-American citizenship – and Azerbaijani national Sevinj Taghiyeva, 32. The court said that the decision was made over fears that the suspects might flee the country, since they do not have strong domestic ties to the US.

 

Natalya Kovalenko