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Pussy Riot Member Alyokhina Detained Again In Crimea
By RFE/RL's Russian Service
A leading member of the Russian Pussy Riot punk protest band, Maria Alyokhina, was detained in Russia-annexed Crimea on February 27, the second time in two days.
The whereabouts of two other Pussy Riot members, Olga Borisova and Aleksandr Sofeyev, were unknown.
The trio had said it planned to stage a protest on the Ukrainian peninsula in support of jailed filmmaker Oleh Sentsov.
An RFE/RL correspondent reported that police detained Alyokhina in a cafe in the Crimean city of Simferopol on February 27.
The move came after she was confronted by several men in traditional Cossack military uniforms who called themselves members of "Crimea's self-defense."
Human rights activists later said that Alyokhina was brought to a police station.
On February 26, Alyokhina, Borisova, and Sofeyev were detained in different parts of Simferopol and taken to a local medical office for tests. It was not clear why the tests were performed.
The trio was later released.
Borisova and Sofeyev planned to return to Moscow on February 27, but an RFE/RL correspondent reported that they were not on the flight from Simferopol to Moscow. They were also not answering their phones.
Russia-imposed Crimean authorities have not officially commented on the detentions.
In August, Alyokhina and Borisova were detained and fined after staging a protest near the remote prison in Siberia where Sentsov is serving a 20-year prison sentence on terror charges that he and supporters say are groundless.
Sentsov is from Crimea, the Ukrainian region that Russia forcibly seized in March 2014.
Pussy Riot achieved prominence in 2012 after Alyokhina and fellow Pussy Riot performer Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" for a stunt in which band members burst into Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral and sang a "punk prayer" against then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who was campaigning for his return to the presidency at the time.
Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were close to the end of their two-year prison sentences when they were freed in December 2013, under an amnesty they dismissed as a propaganda stunt to improve Putin's image ahead of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. They have focused largely on fighting for the rights of prisoners since their release.