(CJES/IFEX) – In the city of Krasnoyarsk, security staff for Krasnoyarsk Region Governor Andrey Khloponin’s residence detained the film crews of five local broadcasting companies – TVK (TV Krasnoyarsk); GTRK (the Krasnoyarsk State broadcasting company); Telesphere channel; Afontovo channel; and ORTV channel – accusing them of trespassing on the grounds of the governor’s residence. The […]
(CJES/IFEX) – In the city of Krasnoyarsk, security staff for Krasnoyarsk Region Governor Andrey Khloponin’s residence detained the film crews of five local broadcasting companies – TVK (TV Krasnoyarsk); GTRK (the Krasnoyarsk State broadcasting company); Telesphere channel; Afontovo channel; and ORTV channel – accusing them of trespassing on the grounds of the governor’s residence. The crews were accompanying a federal wildlife management supervisor conducting a spot check in the Udachniy settlement. Journalists Sergey Dostavalov, Anna Pavlova, Vyacheslav Novokreshchennyh, Natalya Lifanteva, Sergey Mitruhin, Vyacheslav Lebedev and Andrey Gavrilov, as well as wildlife management supervisor Vitaly Netrebko, were detained.
Pavlova, a reporter for the Telesphere channel, told CJES that the journalists and the wildlife service officials were on their way to the banks of the Yenisey River to verify that new construction underway there met all wildlife management norms and that the waterway was accessible to citizens.
“We suddenly came upon the grounds of the governor’s residence [ . . .] however there were no signs indicating that, nor was there a fence,” Pavlova told CJES. “Then, a man in civilian dress appeared and, without identifying himself, demanded that we leave. At first we did not understand what was going on. Then three more people in civilian dress appeared. One of them was with a dog and again began to demand that we leave. Our camera operators were filming the entire incident. And then these people ordered them to stop filming. They told us that we were trespassing on the grounds of the residence. When we tried to explain that there were no signs and fences, so we could not have known that, we were told that there was no time to put a fence there. They called the police. We were detained for three hours on the road before the police arrived and checked all our documents. Only after that were we released.”
Pavlova’s impression was that the policemen who arrived did not know how to react to the detention of the film crew by the security guards. She assumed that they called their superiors and received the command to release the television crews.
Pavlova also told CJES that the senior police officer offered a personal apology, although not an institutional one. However, the crews’ feeling of humiliation remains.
Mitruhin, a correspondent for the Afontovo television station, added that Lebedev, the station’s camera operator, was subjected to particularly humiliating treatment. “When Vyacheslav [Lebedev] started to film and these people whom we did not know [. . .] appeared, the man with a dog approached him and began to shout, ‘Do not film! Throw the camera away!’. He began to pull the camera out of the operator’s hands and to push all the buttons on it. We were afraid that he would break this expensive equipment and tried to calm him down. We had to switch off the camera otherwise he might have had the dog attack us.”
