Week-ending 1 May 2020
Svetlana Prokopyeva: ‘It is a criminal case, but I simply did my journalistic work. I think all the arguments investigators have made against me completely lack logic. They hired several experts to analyze my broadcast, and they all made different cases. One expert said that if I did not sharply express a negative attitude towards a terrorist, that constituted the justification of terrorism. Another stated that saying a man was put in such conditions where he has no other means to express his attitudes was also a justification of terrorism. The last said that using such words as “terrorism” and “an explosion” were ways of justifying terrorism. I think it is complete nonsense. In my story, there were no calls to terrorism, no propaganda, no discussion of the ideology of terrorism, no calls to make explosions. There is nothing like that in my script. So they have to invent some completely foolish arguments against me.’
Source:
Russian journalist Svetlana Prokopyeva says charges against her are ‘an act of intimidation’
In February 2019, police in Pskov, in northwestern Russia, raided the home of journalist Svetlana Prokopyeva. Authorities launched an investigation against Prokopyeva, a stringer and freelance correspondent for the U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Russian service and the liberal Ekho Moskvy radio station, over comments she made on a November 2018 Ekho Moskvy broadcast. CPI, 30 April 2020
