He
was also found guilty of involvement in a non-profit group
"whose activity involves violence against citizens". Ostanin was
arrested in December 2021 and held in Moscow before being
transferred to Barnaul, where he stood trial.
"Upon my arrival in Barnaul from Moscow, without explanation, I
was placed in a solitary cell, about six square metres, in a
basement with a window covered with debris," Ostanin wrote in a
letter published by Navalny's team.
"About a week later, the cell was flooded with ankle-deep
water...In these cells there were rats, ants, spiders," he
wrote.
Navalny's team wrote that investigators had pressured Ostanin to
admit his guilt, but he refused.
Navalny, Putin's best-known critic, is serving sentences
totaling 11-1/2 years in a penal colony on fraud and other
charges he says were trumped up to silence him. Last week
Russian state prosecutors requested a court to jail him for
another 20 years in a new criminal trial for charges including
extremism.
Last month another Navalny campaigner, Liliya Chanysheva, was
sentenced to 7-1/2 years for "extremism".
(Reporting by Lucy Papachristou, editing by Mark Trevelyan)
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