Russian prosecutors requested today a nine-year prison sentence for Yury Dmitriyev, a respected activist who has researched and exhumed Stalin-era mass graves, for allegedly producing child pornography, his lawyer said.
"The prosecutor requested nine years," his attorney, Viktor Anufriyev, told AFP after a court hearing in northwestern Russia.
"Both the criminal case itself and the prosecutor's position are not based on law. They are based on some other motives."
Dmitriyev, 62, who is the head of rights group Memorial's branch in Karelia in northwestern Russia, has been accused of taking pornographic pictures of his adoptive daughter.
A spokeswoman for the Karelia prosecutor's office, Tatyana Kordyukova, told AFP she could not comment on the closed-door hearing.
Dmitriyev's supporters say the case against him is an attempt by authorities to muzzle the outspoken historian whose research drew international attention to one of the darkest chapters of Russia's history.
Experts, who last examined the pictures, came to a conclusion that they were not pornographic but the prosecution took issue with that finding, Anufriyev said.
Dmitriyev was arrested in late 2016 and released last January in a development his supporters hoped was a sign the prosecution did not have sufficient evidence for a strong case.
The historian denies the charges.
Dmitriyev's defence says the photographs were taken to track the health of his daughter following the adoption due to the child's malnourished state.
The pictures had been seized during an illegal search after an anonymous tip to the police.
Dmitriyev spent decades locating and exhuming mass sites where people had been buried following summary executions during Stalin's rule.
He helped open the Sandarmokh memorial in a pine forest in Karelia in memory of thousands of victims -- including many foreigners -- executed in 1937 and 1938.
Dmitriyev was released from pre-trial detention after a number of prominent figures including Natalia Solzhenitsyna, the widow of the Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, urged the authorities to free him.
Rights groups have accused President Vladimir Putin - who was re-elected for a fourth term on Sunday - of seeking to whitewash Stalin's crimes amid patriotic fervour whipped up by state propaganda.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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