| Prosecutors seek 3-year jail for Pussy Riot |
MOSCOW Russian prosecutors demanded three years’ jail on Monday for members of girl band Pussy Riot who had protested against Vladimir Putin in a church performance, as star Madonna pled for clemency.
As the controversial Moscow trial went into its second week, the state prosecutor argued that the young women’s crime was so serious that they needed to be isolated from society.
“This crime is severe and the prosecution considers that their correction is only possible in conditions of isolation from society and the punishment needed must be a real deprivation of freedom,” said prosecutor Alexander Nikiforov.
The women, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alyokhina, barged into the Christ the Saviour Cathedral on the eve of March presidential polls and in a song asked the Virgin Mary to oust Putin. After the “punk prayer” on February 21, the three women, all in their 20s, were detained in March and charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of seven years in jail.
They are being tried in the same Moscow district court where the former Yukos oil chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky underwent a widely criticised trial for tax evasion in 2010.
The prosecutor asked the court to find the women, two of whom have children, “guilty of the crime and set them the following punishment: deprivation of freedom for three years and punishment in a penal colony of a general regime.”
Agencies
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