MOSCOW, September 30 (RIA Novosti) – A jailed Pussy Riot rocker who was hospitalized Sunday amid a hunger strike over prison conditions is being held in isolation and not allowed to meet with lawyers or receive phone calls, her supporters said Monday.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a member of the anti-Kremlin punk group Pussy Riot, is undergoing medical screening to monitor her health after she declared a hunger strike last Monday, according to the Gruppa Voina Twitter account that is believed to be authored by her husband, Pyotr Verzilov.
Hospital officials will not allow her to see or speak to anyone, and her family hasn’t been given any information about her condition in over 90 hours, according to entries posted on the Twitter page.
“The FSIN [Federal Penitentiary Service] has declared a complete blockade of Nadia [Tolokonnikova],” Gruppa Voina tweeted. “There has been no information from her in 90 hours. The lawyers are being denied visits. Calls aren’t answered.”
The Gruppa Voina Twitter account’s author posted a photo of a seemingly official document in which hospital officials banned Tolokonnikova from having visitors because of her “poor condition.”
Doctors classified her condition as “satisfactory” on Sunday after she was transferred to a local hospital from the medical ward of her prison, according to a spokesman for the local penitentiary service department.
Gennady Morozov, the ombudsman for Russia's republic of Mordovia, where the jailed activist's prison colony is located, told RIA Novosti Monday that he would visit Tolokonnikova on Wednesday. He described her condition as “OK” and said she was continuing her hunger strike in the hospital.
The Gruppa Voina account called the hospital’s policy an act of revenge for a letter written by Tolokonnikova, published last Monday by news site Lenta.ru, in which she alleged shockingly inhumane labor and sanitary conditions at her women’s penal colony in Mordovia.
In the letter, Tolokonnikova, 23, who is serving a two-year jail term for a so-called punk prayer performance in a Moscow cathedral in February 2012, also claimed that a deputy warden at the colony had threatened her life, and announced a hunger strike.
Prison authorities say the strike is an attempt at blackmail after they denied Tolokonnikova privileged treatment.
A member of the Presidential Council on Human Rights, Ilya Shablinsky, visited the prison and met with Tolokonnikova and seven other inmates in the days after the letter was published. Shablinsky verified Tolokonnikova’s allegations in comments to the media after the interviews, telling Russian news outlet Gazeta.ru that the conversations he had had with the inmates “made his hair stand on end.”
On Monday, the penal colony announced on its website that it had hosted an open doors day, where inmates' families could take a tour of the prison and ask the jail authorities questions.
“After the official part of the event, tea was served in the canteen, where convicts and their relatives were able to mingle in an informal setting,” the penal colony’s statement said.
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