Political prisoner Leniie Umerova sent a letter in which she described her arrest in detail, comparing it to a gangster movie from the nineties. Her brother, Aziz Umerov, reported this on his Facebook page.
“One moment, and at the border, after checking your documents and personal belongings, four unknown men approach you and force you to get off the bus and do everything as they say. When asked to introduce themselves, they call some fictitious names, but there is nothing to talk about documents. Then they took my personal belongings and took me to an unknown city (later it turned out it was Vladikavkaz). Next – 7 hours of interrogations and threats. Where I’m coming from and where I’m going, what my ethnicity is, why I’m going to Crimea, what’s in my phone, they were even interested in the sticker pack”,- writes Leniie.
Aziz noted that the letter was sent at the beginning of September, but only arrived now, because, as he believes, Leniie continues to write in Ukrainian.
“They released me in the middle of the night, but my taxi on the way to the hotel was stopped by local traffic cops as if to check my documents. Seeing that I was a foreign citizen, they asked for permission, and when they learned that I didn’t have it, they took me to the police station. It turned out that their federal laws prohibit foreigners from driving on their roads without special permission. They immediately held a night trial, and then sent me to a prison for foreigners, where they took away my phone, this time for good. All the time, from the moment of crossing the border, I was forbidden to use the services of lawyers and make calls to loved ones, with whom I contacted later, almost miraculously. I remember that that day in prison, during the search of my personal belongings, I looked and thought how, shaking, this whole surreal thing reminded me of an action-packed gangster movie from the nineties – zero. … Why am I talking about this? This is all a gross evidence of disregard for human rights, freedoms and dignity, which were formed as a result of someone’s aggressive ambitions. The cause of this really needs to be cured”,- she ends.
We remind you that on December 4, 2022, Russian security forces detained Lenya Umerova after crossing the Georgian-Russian border, allegedly for violating the rules of the security zone. The girl was traveling from Kyiv to occupied Crimea due to the deterioration of her father’s condition. Until March 16, Lenya was held in the Temporary Detention Center for Foreign Citizens near Vladikavkaz. The occupiers found the girl guilty of violating the state border regime (Part 1 of Article 18 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation) and fined her 2 thousand rubles.
On the night of March 16, 2023, Leniie Umerova was released, but she was grabbed, put a bag over her head, brought to an unfamiliar area of Vladikavkaz and left there. The girl was detained again and a report was drawn up against her for disobeying the police. She was sentenced to 15 days of administrative arrest. This was subsequently repeated three times.
On May 5, the Lefortovo court in Moscow arrested Crimean Tatar Leniie Umerova for 2 months on suspicion of high treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).