MOSCOW, 11 March 2004 — Several Russian religious leaders yesterday denounced raids that police conducted in mosques weeks before a presidential election in search of potential “terrorists”.
The president of the Islamic Council, Geidar Djemal, called the raids a “gross provocation” at a press conference attended by the nation’s top Protestant and Jewish representatives.
He was referring to raids that took place in several Moscow mosques on Feb. 27, during which police checked documents of people leaving Friday prayers, detaining 80 of them.
There have been several attacks — blamed by the government on rebels from Russia’s war-torn republic of Chechnya — ahead of the March 14 presidential election. The latest, in early February, killed 41 people on a packed Moscow subway train during morning rush hour.
Most of the people detained on Feb. 27 were later released but the Interior Ministry said some had been remanded in custody for being sympathetic to “terrorism”.
“In one of the mosques, we detained people who are not necessarily connected with the blasts but exhibit ideological tendencies sympathetic to terrorism,” Interior Ministry spokesman Nikolai Pershutkin said shortly after the raids.
Anatoly Pchelintsev, a human rights lawyer specializing in religious issues, also denounced mounting attacks against Russia’s non-Orthodox minorities.
“During the past four years the situation of religious minorities has considerably worsened,” he said.
In particular, he said Protestants had been the subject of “brutal” identity checks in the provinces and that regional authorities had declined to open investigations after fires were started with Molotov cocktails at several Protestant churches.
