A lawyer from Chechnya was arrested in St. Petersburg on charges of justifying terrorism.
The court in St. Petersburg sent lawyer Nuri Shamaev to a pre-trial detention center, having found justification for terrorism in his comments. Shamaev himself did not plead guilty.
St. Petersburg lawyer Nuri Shamaev was detained on September 22 on charges of justifying terrorism online (part 2 of article 205.2 of the Criminal Code of Russia). This article provides for a prison sentence of five to seven years.
Courts in southern Russia regularly sentence local residents to real terms in prison for publications on social media under the article on justifying terrorism via the internet. It is impossible to establish the actual number of such sentences, as not all cases of justifying terrorism make it into public court registries.
Today, the Krasnoselsky District Court of St. Petersburg ruled to keep Shamaev in custody until November 4, the Unified Press Service of the city's courts reported on its Telegram channel.
The reason for the criminal case was a comment that Shamaev left online on May 1, 2022. At that time, he was a lawyer of the St. Petersburg Bar Association, and his status is now suspended.
Nuri Shamaev published the comment "Honor of the Nation!" under a post with an image "depicting faces involved in terrorist activities," according to the court's statement. The investigation claims that by publishing this comment, he intended to publicly justify terrorism and was aware of the "criminal nature and public danger of his actions."
Shamaev himself does not admit guilt. He requested house arrest, a ban on certain actions, or bail from the court, as noted in the statement. The court's press service did not specify on which platform the comment attributed to Shamaev was published and who exactly was in the published image.
Nuri Shamaev received his lawyer status on June 25, 1998, according to information on the website of the St. Petersburg City Bar Association. The date of the suspension of his status is not indicated there; as the legal website "Master of Law" points out, the information in the registry was last updated on September 5.
Nuri Shamaev was registered under his full name on the website Proshkolu.ru. There he wrote that he graduated from school No. 1 in Oktyabrsky in 1978 – now Tsotsi-Yurt, Kurchaloyevsky District of Chechnya. In December 2013, he wrote about a reunion of graduates at this school and published his photos with classmates taken during his studies and 35 years later.
"Caucasian Knot" also reported that 22-year-old Mariyam Dondaeva, a native of the Urus-Martan District of Chechnya, was arrested in Oryol on charges of justifying terrorism online. Dondaeva is a student at the Oryol Medical College; in 2020, she enrolled in the budget department to study nursing. The girl's name was added to the registry of terrorists and extremists by Rosfinmonitoring but was soon removed from it.