Russian justice sentenced a lawyer for Alexei Navalny for ringing the doorbell of an agent accused of poisoning him

Russian court sentenced on Thursday Liubov Sobol, Alexei Navalny’s main ally, to one year of community service for trying to enter the house of an alleged security guard who, according to the Leader of the Opposition, participated in poisoning.

Navalny said in December he misled a suspected chemical weapons expert from the Federal Security Service (FSB) to admit that the national intelligence agency had tried to kill him last summer, put poison in her underwear.

Liubov Sobol, lawyer of the NGO Fund to Fight Corruption (FBK, for its acronym in Russian) created by Navalny, that month he went to the house of the alleged agent and rang the doorbell, after which the Russian authorities have opened a criminal investigation against him for trespassing “with recourse to violence or threat of use”.

A Moscow court said on its Telegram channel on Thursday that it had given him a suspended sentence of “Correctional work for a period of one year.”

Added that 10% of his salary would go to the state each month as part of his punishment.

Sobol had come to court with a white t-shirt printed with red text that read: “Where’s the criminal case for the poisoning of Navalny?”

After his conviction, Sobol said on Twitter: “In the meantime, a case regarding the attempted assassination of Navalny has not yet been launched.”

Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira yarmysh, added in the same social network as the decision will not prevent Sobol from voting in the legislative elections this autumn.

His lawyer Vladimir Voronin said he had already prepared an appeal to the ruling.

The complaint against Sobol was originally filed by a woman who, according to the press, is the mother-in-law of Konstantin Kudriavtsev, an FSB chemistry expert, whose identity had been revealed a few days earlier by Navalny.

The opposition leader, who was in Germany, then posted a video of a telephone conversation in which he allegedly Kudriavtsev reveals chemical used to poison him sprayed into one of opponent’s underwear in a hotel in the Siberian city of Tomsk.

The FSB issued a statement in which called said conversation “false”, which he considered as an orchestrated “provocation” in order to “discredit” the security service.

The phone conversation took place a few hours before, on December 14, the digital medium Bellingcat, Your partners The mirror Yes CNN, will denounce with Navalny that a command of FSB chemical weapons experts was implicated in its poisoning.

Navalny, who was arrested in Moscow last January on his return from Germany and sent to prison to serve a previously suspended sentence, accused the Russian president, Vladimir Poutine, to order his murder.

The opposition leader has been detained on an old criminal case in a prison about 100 kilometers east of Moscow., where since March 31, he began a hunger strike to request treatment from a trusted doctor due to his deteriorating state of health.

A Russian military court dismissed his complaint last month for the lack of a criminal investigation into his poisoning.

Navalny, his allies and his regional network regularly face raids and arrests for their political activities.

Shortly after Sobol’s conviction, the Navalny Anti-Corruption Fund said on Twitter that its regional offices in the Siberian city of Irkutsk were facing a police raid.

(With information from AFP and EFE)

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