'Arctic 30' being moved to St Petersburg
AFP
November 12, 2013, 2:01 am
Moscow (AFP) - Russia moved the crew of a Greenpeace Arctic protest ship from the northern port of Murmansk on Monday and put them on a train to Saint Petersburg, authorities and the organisation said.
"The decision has been made to transfer all 30 of the accused to detention centres in Saint Petersburg," the Investigative Committee said in a statement, saying that their charges "do not fall under the jurisdiction of courts in the Murmansk region."
The Saint Petersburg prison service said in a statement that the "detention centres of the city are ready to receive these people," without specifying which of the facilities would be used.
The 28 activists and two reporters, arrested in September after protesting against oil exploration in the Barents Sea, left their detention centre at 5:00 am (0100 GMT) in a truck and are now on a train, said Greenpeace spokeswoman Dannielle Taaffe.
"The Arctic30 are being transferred away from Murmansk. They shouldn?t be in jail at all!" Greenpeace wrote on its Twitter account.
Greenpeace released photographs of guards in camouflage and a prison service truck parked on a snow-covered platform alongside a long-distance train carriage without windows.
The train is due to arrive in Saint Petersburg at 12:11 pm (0811 GMT) on Tuesday, Greenpeace said.
The No. 21 passenger train will pull into the city's Ladozhsky station after a journey of about 1,500 kilometres (950 miles) that takes 27 hours.
But it was unclear whether the prison carriage would ever reach the city centre.
A spokesman for the city's branch of Greenpeace told Interfax news agency that: "We imagine the activists could be unloaded at a technical station before the train arrives in Saint Petersburg."
A source in the law enforcement authorities confirmed this to ITAR-TASS news agency.
"The train will stop at a certain secret place. They will be brought out from the special carriages into trucks, then they will be taken to the detention centre's reception centre," the source said.
The arrested crew of the ship Arctic Sunrise includes 26 foreigners from 18 countries held for nearly two months on charges of piracy and hooliganism after an attempt to scale an oil platform operated by Russia's energy giant Gazprom.
One of Russia's northernmost cities, Murmansk endures polar nights in the winter, with temperatures often dropping to below minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit).
Several activists in mid-September attempted to scale Russia's Gazprom oil platform in the Pechora Sea, part of the Barents Sea, in protest at the firm's exploration in the Arctic.
Russian authorities boarded the ship on September 19 and towed it to Murmansk. Greenpeace says the authorities had no right to detain the Dutch-flagged ship in international waters.
Russian authorities initially accused the activists of carrying out illegal research, then charged them with piracy. They then changed the piracy charge to hooliganism, an offence that can be punished by a maximum of seven years in prison.
But Greenpeace said the piracy charge was never officially lifted.
Last month, Russian authorities also said the ship carried illegal drugs such as poppy straw and morphine, which Greenpeace denies.
The platform is located in Russia's exclusive economic zone on the Arctic shelf, which means that most Russian laws do not apply there.
