By Tatyana Makeyeva and Maria Tsvetkova
POKROV, Russia (Reuters) – Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was transferred to a penal colony outside Moscow to serve his prison sentence, a public commission said on Sunday, weeks after he returned to Russia after being poisoned.
Navalny’s whereabouts have been unknown since Thursday, when his allies learned that he was transferred from one of Moscow’s most infamous prisons to an undisclosed location.
Navalny, 44, was arrested on his return from Germany last month and was sentenced to more than two and a half years for parole violations he said were forged.
He was transferred to a penal colony in the Vladimir region, the Moscow Public Monitoring Commission said on its website, which defends the rights of prisoners and has access to people in custody.
State news agency TASS specified that Navalny will serve his sentence in penal colony number 2 in the city of Pokrov, about 100 km (60 miles) east of Moscow.
Reuters photos showed metallic gray buildings behind a gray fence and barbed wire inside the colony, as well as the golden domes of a church. A guard at the gate asked reporters to keep a distance of at least 100 meters (yards) if they wanted to shoot.
Ruslan Vakhapov, a local activist with the prisoners’ rights group Jailed Russia, described the conditions as particularly severe.
“In short, it is a bad colony,” Ruslan Vakhapov told Reuters by telephone.
Many inmates cooperate with the colony administration and help them monitor other inmates closely, abusing them if they violate a rigid daily routine, said Vakhapov.
“If there is a need to prevent Navalny from communicating with other people, no one will speak to him,” said the activist.
“(If something happens), he won’t be able to ask for help until his lawyer arrives,” he added.
A service officer who answered a call at the prison refused to answer questions about Navalny.
Navalny will be quarantined as a precaution against the spread of the coronavirus before joining other prisoners in the colony, the monitoring commission said, according to the RIA news agency.
Earlier on Sunday, a Navalny ally, Leonid Volkov, asked authorities on Twitter to provide official information about his whereabouts and access to him by his lawyers.
Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic, suffered near-fatal poisoning in Siberia in August, with what many Western countries have said are a nervous agent. Navalny accuses Putin of ordering his attempted murder.
Putin dismissed this, claiming that Navalny is part of a US-backed campaign of dirty tricks to discredit him.
(Reporting by Tatyana Makeyeva in Pokrov and Maria Tsvetkova in Moscow; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky, Matthias Williams and Frances Kerry)