Missing Pussy Riot band member ‘transferred to penal colony in Siberia’

Washington – A jailed member of the Pussy Riot protest band, who went missing since she was moved to a new prison, is on her way to a new penal colony in Siberia.

Her husband said that Nadezhda Tolokonnikova is on her way to a new prison colony deep in the Krasnoyarsk region.

According to the Huffington Post, Tolokonnikova, 23, had alleged that she faced major prison abuses in her previous colony in central Russia.

Her husband Pyotr Verzilov wrote on Twitter that information about her wife came from a reliable source.

The penal colony number 50 in the town of Nizhny Ingash lies about 300 kilometres from the regional centre Krasnoyarsk, four time zones away from Moscow and sitting on Russia’s Trans-Siberian railway.

Verzilov added that Tolokonnikova is transferred 4500 kilometers from central Russia to the heart of Siberia as punishment for the resonance of her letter.

Tolokonnikova wrote in a letter that prisoners at Penal Colony No. 14 were made to work 17-hours-a-day stitching police uniforms and even forced to stand outside in the cold or denied food at times.

According to the report, with just months left of her two-year term for performing a “punk prayer” in Russia’s main Orthodox cathedral protesting ties between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin, Tolokonnikova had demanded to be transferred from her prior colony in Mordovia region.

She went on a hunger strike in protest of conditions she described as ‘slave labour’ and constant harassment by colony administration.

The strike ended when she started having health problems and was placed on a drip in the prison hospital.

Verzilov then said he had lost sight of his wife after October 22, and complained that despite constant queries to Russia’s prison service about her whereabouts only received a response that she was being transferred.

Russia’s rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin said that he had been assured that Tolokonnikova was in good health and had a doctor accompanying her on her long transfer.