Pussy Riot Pair 'Arrested Near Sochi Olympics'

Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova tweet that they have been detained on suspicion of robbery near the Olympic venues.

11:33am UK, Tuesday 18 February 2014

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina

 

Two members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot have been arrested near the Sochi Winter Olympics.

Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were detained by law enforcement authorities on Tuesday, the activists said on Twitter.
"We have been arrested ... and are accused of robbery," Ms Tolokonnikova wrote.
Ms Alyokhina said they had been detained on suspicion of committing a crime but did not give details.
Both women said police used force and threw them in a police van.

The women with Madonna in New York earlier this month

"At the time of our detention, we weren't engaged in any protests, we were walking around Sochi. WE WERE WALKING," Ms Tolokonnikova said.
It is believed they were arrested in central Sochi, some 30km north of the main Olympic venues.
Russian human rights activist Semyon Simonov said they had been accused of theft and that several other activists who were protesting alleged abuses of migrant labourers were being held with them.
The two women were in the city with other members of Pussy Riot to record a musical film called 'Putin Will Teach You To Love The Motherland', Ms Tolokonnikova's husband said on his Twitter.
Members of the band spent nearly two years in prison but were released in December.

Sergei Udaltsov faces 10 years in prison.

They were convicted of hooliganism after staging a protest in Moscow's most prominent cathedral in opposition to President Vladimir's Putin's government.
Ms Alyohina and Ms Tolokonnikova recently visited the US to take part in an Amnesty International concert where they were welcomed on stage by Madonna.
Mr Putin has staked his reputation on the Winter Games, hoping they will show the world Russia's modern face more than two decades since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, a Moscow court has opened the trial of radical opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov on charges of using the funding of a Georgian politician to try to destabilise President Putin's rule.
The high-profile case stems from bloody protests involving tens of thousands of demonstrators that broke out in Moscow on the eve of Mr Putin's swearing-in to a third Kremlin term in May 2012.
Udaltsov, 37, and his co-defendant Leonid Razvozzhayev both face up to 10 years in a high security penal colony on charges of fomenting mass unrest and "destabilising the sociopolitical situation in the Russian Federation".