The Investigative Committee for Arkhangelsk opened a criminal case against Lilia Zhlobitskaya, the aunt of Mikhail Zhlobitsky, who detonated a bomb in the regional FSB department. It is reported by OVD-Info with reference to the woman herself.
The case under the article on the public justification of terrorism using the Internet (part 2 of article 205.2 of the Criminal Code) was opened at the end of December 2022 due to the fact that Zhlobitskaya reposted poems about her nephew on VKontakte in November and December 2019. The security forces came to her with a search, after which she was taken to the Investigative Committee for interrogation. She is currently under bail.
Zhlobitskaya is charged with publishing on VKontakte a link to the website stihi.ru, where a poem about the “explosion in the premises of the secret police” was published. The indictment also mentions two reposts from the People's Self-Defense group with photographs of Mikhail Zhlobitsky and texts about the explosion in the Arkhangelsk FSB.
An examination ordered by the prosecution concluded that the texts contain linguistic and psychological signs of recognizing Zhlobitsky’s actions as “correct, in need of support and imitation, that is, their justification”, as well as “signs of the formation of an ideology of violence in the recipient and the practice of influencing decision-making state authorities, local governments associated with the intimidation of the population … ".
There are also testimonies of two witnesses who visited Zhlobitskaya's page on VKontakte and saw her reposts of poems.
In October 2018, 17-year-old student Mikhail Zhlobitsky set off an explosion in the building of the Arkhangelsk department of the FSB. The young man died, three more employees of the department were injured. Shortly before the explosion, a message about a planned explosion appeared on Telegram in the open chat of the Rebel Speech. In this regard, the UK opened a criminal case on the attack.
According to OVD-Info, during this time about 30 criminal cases were opened throughout the country on the "justification of terrorism" in the wake of the explosion in the FSB. The most famous was the case against Svetlana Prokopyeva, a correspondent for Radio Liberty and Echo of Moscow in Pskov, who wrote about Zhlobitsky's possible motives. The journalist was fined 500 thousand rubles.
