In Stavropol Territory, law enforcers come to search apartments of Nadezhdin’s supporters

Officers of the Centre to Combat Extremism (CCE, also known as Centre “E”) in the Stavropol Territory have been conducting searches for several days now at the apartments of the activists who were collecting signatures in support of the nomination of Boris Nadezhdin as a presidential candidate.

The “Caucasian Knot” has reported that on January 30, it became known that more than 14,000 signatures were collected in support of the nomination of Boris Nadezhdin as a presidential candidate in Southern Russia. On February 8, the Central Election Commission (CEC) refused to register Boris Nadezhdin as a candidate to run for presidency. The CEC announced that it had identified a critically high number of invalid signatures.

One of the activists who collected signatures has reported about the searches conducted by the police at the places of residence of the Boris Nadezhdin’s election campaign activists.

“While in the city of Yessentuki, the police acted calmly and politely, then the situation with the collector from Mikhailovsk was much worse: her personal computer and mobile phone were confiscated,” the source reported.

He has suggested that law enforcers make such visits before the election with the purpose of intimidation of activists. “The police came to those who were associated with the election observation for an obvious reason: to intimidate people on the eve of the presidential election, perhaps not so much us, but other citizens who are going to go vote on March 17,” the source noted.

The police also conducted searches at the activists’ places of residence on March 13, reported Aleksandr Korovainy, an activist who coordinated the collection of signatures for Boris Nadezhdin in the Stavropol Territory.

“All searches were carried out with gross violations ... It seemed that the police were intimidating people so that they would refuse to observe the election, and the election could be easily falsified,” Aleksandr Korovainy emphasized.