Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been moved from a jail in Russia’s Vladimir region and his whereabouts are currently unknown, according to a post on Friday on Navalny’s Twitter account, citing his lawyers, Reuters reported.
Navalny was on his way to a penal colony to serve his prison sentence, a public commission said on Feb. 28, weeks after he returned to Russia after being poisoned.
On Wednesday, the trial of Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer for Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation who is charged with trespassing, was adjourned just minutes after it started due to technical issues, Radio Free Europe reported.
The Perovsky district court of the Russian capital started the trial on March 10 but quickly noted that there were “technical shortcomings in the materials of the case” and adjourned the hearing until March 23.
Sobol is charged with illegally forcing her way into the apartment of a relative of Federal Security Service (FSB) officer Konstantin Kudryavtsev. If convicted, Sobol faces up to two years in prison.
On December 21, Sobol went to the residential building in Moscow where Kudryavtsev lived at the time. Sobol went just hours after Navalny had published a recording of what he said was a phone conversation with Kudryavtsev.
During the 49-minute phone call, in which the anti-corruption campaigner posed as an FSB official conducting an internal review, Kudryavtsev described the details of an operation to poison the Kremlin critic in August.
Investigators say Sobol pushed Kudryavtsev’s mother-in-law, who opened the door, and forcefully entered the apartment adjacent to the one where Kudryavtsev lived.
Sobol’s team have described the case as political “revenge” for the lawyer not being afraid to ask questions of the alleged assassin.
The investigators say they were unable to locate and question Kudryavtsev, who is neither a witness nor a plaintiff in the case. The apartment he lived in at the time of the events in question now officially belongs to the state.
Navalny was arrested on January 17 upon his returned to Russia from Germany, where he received life-saving treatment from the nerve-agent poisoning in Siberia in August.
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