Two Jehovah's Witnesses convicted in KChR for spreading extremist literature

The Cherkessk City Court in the Karachay-Cherkessian Republic (KChR) has found Jehovah's Witnesses Andrei Volikov and Dmitry Metelin guilty of distributing extremist literature and fined them by 1000 roubles each. The activists deny that they had spread any extremist literature.

"Our co-believers from Cherkessk have no doubts that the literature found in the hall of Jehovah's Witnesses Church in Cherkessk was actually planted on them; and we have good reason to think that it was really so. The court has disregarded the arguments of our co-believers, who drew the court's attention to this fact. We regret very much about the decision; and most likely, we'll appeal against it at higher instances," Ivan Belenko, the spokesman of the Administrative Centre of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia, told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

"In our opinion, the literature of Jehovah's Witnesses was put on the federal list of extremist materials as a result of judicial errors. We, as well as lawyers and experts believe that this literature is not extremist. We hope that sooner or later these judicial errors will be corrected, and our literature will be removed from the federal list of extremist materials," said Belenko.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.