The court in Samara sent four Jehovah’s Witnesses to prison on charges of extremism

The district court in Samara sentenced four representatives of the Jehovah’s Witnesses church to seven years in prison. Aram Danielyan, Denys Kuzyanin, Sergey Polosenko and Nikolay Vasiliev were found guilty of organizing the activities of an extremist organization, the Sova Center reports.

The case was initiated back in 2021. The prosecution presented at the court secret recordings of religious services and personal conversations about the Bible, in which believers participated, reports the website of the church in Russia. The Federal Security Service conducted the investigation.

Vasilyev was detained while visiting a co-religionist, and torture was used against him, church representatives claimed. When the owner of the apartment, where the detention was held, refused to give the law enforcement officers access to the computer, they began pouring boiling water over Vasilyev’s hands, legs, and neck and placing a heated kettle on his hands.

Another detainee reported torture with a kettle. On the computer of one of the defendants, an FSB employee saved documents that were later used as evidence in court, according to the Yehovist report.

The Church of Jehovah’s Witnesses is recognized as an extremist organization in Russia. Her parishioners are regularly arrested and sent to colonies. More than 430 people were convicted, almost 800 people were suspected and accused. The ban on the church and the criminal cases against its parishioners were criticized by international and Russian human rights organizations, the USA and the European Union, while Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke out against it.

In June 2022, the European Court of Human Rights found the ban on materials, parishes and believers of Jehovah’s Witnesses to be contrary to the Convention on the Protection of Human Rights, and demanded that the criminal cases be stopped and the prisoners released. By that time, Moscow had announced that it would not comply with the court’s decision due to the exclusion of Russia from the Council of Europe for its invasion of Ukraine.