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Foreign Ministry should decide whether CNN journalists violated accreditation terms — MP

According to the lawmaker, the journalists had no identification signs and did not respond to officers’ demands

MOSCOW, April 6. /TASS/. The Russian Foreign Ministry should examine a possible violation of accreditation terms by CNN journalists, detained near a Russian penitentiary facility where blogger Alexey Navalny is serving his sentence, a senior member of the Russian parliament’s lower chamber said on Tuesday.

"If unbiased coverage of events, which CNN had declared, transforms into a political action, it can only be described as interference in Russia’s internal matters," said Vasily Piskarev, who chairs the parliamentary commission investigating facts of foreign interference into Russia’s domestic affairs.

"I think that the authority that had issued their accreditation - which is the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs - should make a compliance assessment regarding those journalists’ behavior and decide on whether those CNN journalists can continue their work in Russia," Piskarev’s press service quoted him as saying.

According to the lawmaker, the journalists had no identification signs, did not respond to officers’ demands, and "in fact, were participating in a political event, staged by a group of Alexey Navalny’s supporters."

"The Russian Foreign Ministry should carefully examine whether CNN journalists’ behavior corresponds to our country’s terms of accreditation," Piskarev added.

On Tuesday, the Vladimir Region police said nine people were brought to a police station for violating public order in front of penal colony N. 2 in Pokrov, where blogger Alexey Navalny is serving a prison term.

The Russian Foreign Ministry told TASS that correspondents of the CNN television network had been detained in the Vladimir Region and taken to a local police station pending inquiry. They refused to leave the road when asked to do so by police, and did not show their accreditation IDs, diplomats said. Later, CNN correspondent Matthew Chance said he and other journalists had been released.

Moscow’s Simonovsky court on February 2 replaced Navalny’s suspended 3.5-year prison term in the Yves Rocher case with a real one due to numerous violations of the rules the sentence required. On February 20, the Moscow City Court upheld this decision as legal and it entered into force.