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Freed Pussy Riot Members Visit Russian Women’s Prison


Pussy Riot's Maria Alyokhina (center) and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (right) enter a court building in Moscow on January 9.
Pussy Riot's Maria Alyokhina (center) and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (right) enter a court building in Moscow on January 9.
Two recently amnestied members of the feminist punk protest group Pussy Riot have returned to the penal colony in Nizhny Novgorod where one of them was imprisoned to support inmates' rights.

Maria Alyokhina spent the last several months of her prison term in Correctional Institution for Women No. 2.

She made her visit with Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, with whom she has pledged to campaign for inmates' rights.

The two were expected to meet with several inmates who say they are being mistreated.

Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were sentenced to two years in prison in 2012 on hooliganism charges for an anti-Putin protest in a Moscow cathedral.

They were both released from prison three months early under a Kremlin amnesty in December.

The two women were accompanied on their visit by Tolokonnikova's husband, Pyotr Verzilov, and two human rights activists.

Alyokhina also shared a photograph of their visit via Twitter :

With reporting by Interfax

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