Source: HRO.org (info), 26/04/12

· Right of assembly  · Prisoners  · Political prisoners

On 25 April Sergei Mokhnatkin was released from Torzhok penal colony. ‘They have released him! Now let them give him back Tsyga the cat’, journalist Olga Romanova wrote in her blog. She called for the prison administration to give Mokhnatkin back his cat, something they had refused to do.

‘The administration of penal colony No. 4 will not give Mokhnatkin his cat, Tsyga. Perhaps it will sell him the cat? Dear comrades, sell the cat – for cash!!! The money will go to increase the colony’s income!!! Or for whatever purpose you choose,’ Romanova writes.

Rosbalt news agency reports that earlier, outside the walls of the penal colony in Tver region, a picket was held to demand that Mokhnatkin, now pardoned, be released without delay. About 15 activists assembled and tied white ribbons onto the bars of the colony’s gate.

On Monday it became known that Dmitry Medvedev had pardoned Sergei Mokhnatkin, sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison on charges of resisting police during a Strategy-31 demonstration. The text of the decree, published on the official website of the Russian Legal Information Agency (RAPSI), reads: ‘Pardon Sergei Evgenievich Mokhnatkin, born 1954, convicted on 9 June 2010 by Moscow’s Tver district court, freeing him from further serving his prison sentence.’