In the photo: the raid on Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Astrakhan region in 2020
On the morning of September 28, searches were conducted in at least 4 homes of local Jehovah's Witnesses in Crimea. According to available information, one of the raids took place at the home of a resident of Nizhnegorsky, 44.
The security forces also invaded the home Sergey Parfenovich, 50, and opened a criminal case against him under an extremist article based on his religion.
Update.
According to updated information, searches took place at 8 addresses in the settlements of Nizhnegorskiy and Krasnogvardeyskoye, as well as in the neighboring village of Petrovka. Sergey Parfenovich, 50, and Aleksander Vinichenko, 49, were detained and taken to Simferopol. Late in the evening Vinichenko was released. In the coming days, the court will choose a preventive measure for Parfenovich. Now he is in the temporary detention facility.
The searches were carried out by employees of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation and the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, some of them were wearing masks and with weapons. Investigative measures at Vinichenko were carried out with the participation of law enforcement officers Nikolay Schmidt, D. A. Yavnik, as well as V. A. Novikov, an investigator for especially important cases of the Investigative Committee, who led the case of believers from Yalta.
The security forces invaded the believers around 6:30 a.m., while they were still asleep. The searches lasted from 5 to 6 hours. In one house at that moment there was a minor child and an elderly disabled relative. Law enforcement officers seized electronic devices and storage media, a router, personal records and a photo album. According to believers, the security forces tried to find out their passwords for electronic devices. In one case, they managed to unlock the phone by putting the hand of a family member to the device.
To date, Russian law enforcement officers in Crimea have opened 9 criminal cases against 16 local Jehovah's Witnesses. The verdict against five of them has already entered into force.
