Paris (AFP) – France has charged four people over a suspected plot against a Russian dissident, prosecutors said Friday, after a refugee who helped reveal abuses in Russian prisons said he was targeted.
Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian living in France who leads Gulagu.net, a non-governmental organisation that specialises in uncovering Russian abuses, told the French news agency AFP he was the target "of these gangsters, these killers".
France's PNAT national anti-terrorism prosecutor's office has declined to name him, but said it had charged four men aged 26 to 38 with forming a "terrorist association" aiming to harm a person or persons, and was holding them in custody.
It said it had opened an investigation last month into a plan to kill, harm or abduct a Russian dissident on French soil and passed on the details to the domestic intelligence service, leading to the four men being arrested on Monday.
A source close to the case said they were all from Dagestan, in the Russian North Caucasus, but one had French nationality.
Three of them allegedly went to the southwestern city of Biarritz in April – where Osechkin lives – and took video footage that includes images of his home, but not of the dissident himself, according to the source.
The main suspect arrested claimed they were all on holiday in Biarritz, but their versions had discrepancies, the source said.
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Osechkin told AFP late on Thursday that he was well, and thanked French counter-terrorism services for saving him from individuals he described as President Vladimir "Putin's assassins".
French prosecutors in September 2022 opened a probe into alleged death threats against Osechkin but found "no objective element" to back his claim that someone was trying to kill him.
Osechkin told AFP at the time he had been at home with his wife and children and working in the dark when he noticed "a moving red dot on the railing of one of the terraces and then moving towards me on the wall".
He said he had been informed in February that year of an assassination plot against him and was subsequently put under police protection.
Gulagu.net rose to prominence in 2021 after publishing videos showing rapes in Russian prisons, as well as testimonies from victims and, extremely unusually, from the perpetrators, leading to the opening of an investigation by the authorities.
It claims to have more than 1,000 videos showing torture in Russian jails.
