Russia-imposed law enforcement officers have detained at least 34 Crimean Tatar activists who came to express support for six men arrested for belonging to the Hizb ut-Tahrir Islamic group in Ukraine’s Moscow-annexed Crimea.
The activists were detained on January 25 when they gathered near the Kyiv district court building in the Crimean capital, Simferopol. The court ruled to send six Crimean Tatar activists to pretrial detention until at least March 24.
The six men -- Ekrem Krosh, Ayder Asanov, Refat Seydametov, Osman Abdurazzakov, Leman Zekiryayev, and Khalil Mambetov -- were detained on January 24 after police searched their homes in Crimea's Dzhankoy district.
Since Russia seized Crimea in 2014, Russian authorities have prosecuted dozens of Crimean Tatars for allegedly belonging to Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamic group that is banned in Russia but not in Ukraine.
Moscow’s takeover of the peninsula was vocally opposed by many Crimean Tatars, who are a sizable minority in the region.
Exiled from their homeland to Central Asia by Soviet authorities under the dictatorship of Josef Stalin during World War II, many Crimean Tatars are very wary of Russia and Moscow's rule.
Rights groups and Western governments have denounced what they describe as a campaign of repression by the Russian-imposed authorities in Crimea who are targeting members of the Turkic-speaking Crimean Tatar community and others who have spoken out against Moscow's takeover of the peninsula.
Russia took control of Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014 after sending in troops, seizing key facilities, and staging a referendum dismissed as illegal by at least 100 countries.
Moscow also backs separatists in a war against government forces that has killed more than 13,200 people in eastern Ukraine since April 2014.
