Human rights watchdogs have demanded the immediate release of Maria Ponomarenko, saying the psychiatric evaluation of criminal suspects does not include any injections.
Siberian journalist Maria Ponomarenko, who was sentenced to six years in prison last month on a charge of discrediting Russia’s armed forces involved in Moscow ongoing invasion of Ukraine, says she was beaten while in custody.
Telegram channel RusNews carried Ponomarenko's handwritten letter on March 24, in which the journalist wrote that after she was transferred to a detention center in the city of Biisk, guards took away some of her belongings and food that her mother had brought and ordered her to take her clothes off, which she refused to do before having what she described as a nervous breakdown.
According to Ponomarenko, the guards then called medical personnel from a local psychiatric clinic, who arrived and then began to beat her, hitting her in the back and head before slamming her body on a desk and a bench. She added she was punched several times and that the attacks continued even once she was inside an ambulance.
Ponomarenko wrote that she was kept in a psychiatric clinic for three days, where she was also intimidated and even beaten by a nurse named Maxim for drinking her cocoa too slowly.
Ponomarenko's lawyer, Dmitry Shitov, told RFE/RL that his client is now back in a detention center in Biisk, adding that he learned about Ponomarenko's ordeal a day earlier.
Ponomarenko, a mother of two young children, was arrested in St. Petersburg in April 2022 and later transferred to her native city of Barnaul in Siberia, where she worked for the RusNews website.
The charge against her stemmed from her online posts about an attack by Russian military jets against a theater in the Ukrainian port of Mariupol that killed hundreds of civilians, including children.
Ponomarenko said in July that while in pretrial detention she was forcibly taken to a psychiatric clinic where she was ordered to undergo a "psychiatric evaluation" and forcibly injected with unknown substances when she demanded her personal belongings or hygiene items.
Human rights watchdogs demanded the immediate release of Ponomarenko, saying the psychiatric evaluation of criminal suspects does not include any injections.
