MOSCOW, February 4 (Itar-Tass) – Inspection of the Internet video clips allegedly exposing violations at the December 2011 parliamentary election in Russia has shown that many of the clips had clear elements of montage, Vladimir Markin, an official spokesman for Russia’s Investigations Committee said Saturday.
“As part of procedural inspections of the violations related to the campaign for election of deputies to the State Duma of the sixth convocation, the Investigations Committee has studied the video footage uploaded in the Internet, which allegedly shows the encroachments that occurred at the polling stations,” Markin said.
“As part of the inspection, criminology experts drew a conclusion that most video clips contain clear elements of montage,” he said.
“Such footage was recorded, for instance, in the Moscow, Kemerovo, Sverdlovsk, Tyumen, and Tula regions, the Krasnoyarsk territory, the constituent republics of Chuvashia and North Ossetia, as well as the cities of St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Moscow,” Markin said.
“But the most remarkable thing is that all the clips were uploaded from the same server, which is located in California, and the Investigations Committee is making steps now to identify the authors and customers of these video products,” he said.
January 27, Investigations Committee chairman Alexander Bastrykin said at a meeting with MPs the agency had about a hundred clips on electoral encroachments. When an MP asked him about the faked footage circulated in the Internet, he said: “This is an important problem because such clips do exist and we have about a hundred at our disposal.”
“The studies are partly done by our specialists and partly by Interior Ministry specialists,” Bastrykin said. “We’ll complete it by all means and will report on the results separately.”