Rights defenders declare Leniye Umerova as political prisoner

The criminal prosecution of Leniye Umerova, a Crimean Tatar woman, detained at a checkpoint in North Ossetia and accused of espionage, contradicts the Geneva Convention for the Protection of Civilians, the human rights project "Support for Political Prisoners. Memorial" has stated.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that on May 4, 2023, relatives of the 25-year-old Leniye Umerova, who had been kept in the detention centre in Vladikavkaz since December 2022, learned that she was suspected of espionage. They treated her accusation as fabricated.

The project "Support for Political Prisoners. Memorial" has recognized Umerova as a political prisoner.

"She was taken to Vladikavkaz, where she was 'officially' detained, after which the court arrested her for 15 days four times in a row for allegedly disobeying the police," human rights defenders have stated.

Two months later, Umerova was taken to Moscow, where she was arrested on charges of espionage. According to the FSB (Russian Federal Security Service), Umerova "transmitted information about Russian military facilities and equipment of the 'Vostok' (East) group." Now she faces up to 20 years of freedom deprivation.

Human rights defenders insist that investigators had charges Umerova with transferring information before April 2022. "Then, the transfer of this information was not a crime in the Russian Federation," they assert, emphasizing that the article on "espionage" was expanded on July 14, 2022.

Human rights defenders have also voiced out their "serious doubts that had done this in principle." "According to her father, she is charged with some photos from the Internet. Umerova's brother claims that from the first days of the special military operation (SMO) she was in Turkey, and not in the Kyiv Region," the report says.