Apartment of mother of PARNAS activist detained in Kostroma searched - Yashin
MOSCOW. July 31 (Interfax) - PARNAS party deputy chairman Ilya Yashin has reported that a search has been conducted at the apartment belonging to the mother of Andrei Pivovarov, head of the party's Kostroma election campaign, who was arrested earlier.
"A search has been carried out at the apartment of Pivovarov's mother in St. Petersburg," Yashin wrote on his Twitter page on Friday.
He said on Thursday that Pivovarov's mother had been summoned to the Russian Interior Ministry's Center for the Fight against Extremism for a 'preventative' conversation.
On Wednesday, a court in the town of Kostroma ruled in favor of an investigator's request and agreed to remand Pivovarov into custody.
Pivovarov was detained together with a police officer in Kostroma in the early hours of July 28.
Yashin then said that the PARNAS activist had come to a policeman to verify the authenticity of the personal information provided by citizens who had submitted their signatures during the election campaign. The police officer invited Pivovarov to his office and asked him to wait there. Shortly afterwards, Interior Ministry detectives entered the office, detained Pivovarov and the policeman and took them to the headquarters of the Russian Investigative Committee's branch for the Kostroma region.
The region's investigative services then opened a criminal inquiry into claims of unauthorized access to computer files and abuse of power. A police officer and a resident of St. Petersburg were detained as suspects.
Investigators believe that late on July 27, an employee of the Russian Interior Ministry's branch for the Kostroma district illegally allowed a private individual to access the Interior Ministry branch's integrated database containing regional residents' passport data, which is for official use only.
