A doctor from the central Russian city of Ryazan who signed an open letter calling for an investigation into the death in prison of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, has been interrogated by agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), independent news outlet Avtozak LIVE reported on Wednesday.
The woman, whom Avtozak LIVE named as Yekaterina Teryokhina, was detained by FSB officers on Wednesday morning after they searched her house in connection with an unspecified “extremism case”. She was released after being interrogated and had her phone confiscated, the outlet wrote.
Teryokhina told Avtozak LIVE that FSB officers had asked her about Navalny’s personal doctor Andrey Polupan, who previously ridiculed the Russian Investigative Committee’s claim that Navalny died of natural causes for being “bullshit”.
The FSB reportedly also showed Teryokhina screenshots from a group chat that she was part of, in which medics discussed ways to support colleagues facing persecution for political reasons, and asked her if she had attended protests in support of Navalny.
Without naming Teryokhina, Russian human rights group OVD-Info confirmed that a medic had been detained in Ryazan on Wednesday. According to Teryokhina’s husband, the FSB officers said they had received “an order from Moscow” to investigate all the medics in the chat, as they posed “some kind of threat”.
According to OVD-Info, the woman signed public appeals in relation to Alexey Navalny’s case, as well as to the case of Nadezhda Buyanova, a paediatrician from Moscow currently on trial for spreading “false information” about the Russian army.
Over 180 Russian doctors, including Teryokhina, signed an open letter to Russia’s Investigative Committee in August demanding that a criminal case be opened into the conduct of prison staff at the Arctic penal colony where Navalny died suddenly in February, suggesting that Navalny’s death occurred “as a result of negligence” on the part of prison guards.
At least two more medics, whose whereabouts are unknown, were detained by the Russian security services on Wednesday, Alexander Vanyukov, a surgeon who also signed the Navalny letter, told TV Dozhd on Wednesday, adding that one member of the group chat “had no relation to medicine” and could have reported the group to the FSB.
