France has arrested four people over a suspected plot against a Russian dissident who has helped reveal abuses in Russian prisons, officials and the dissident have said.
Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian refugee living in France who leads Gulagu.net, a non-governmental organisation that specialises in uncovering the Russian abuses, told AFP he was the target, “of these gangsters, these killers”.
France’s PNAT national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office had declined to name him, but said it had opened an investigation last month into a plan to kill, harm or abduct a Russian dissident on French soil and passed on details to domestic intelligence service.
On Thursday, PNAT opened a criminal probe into the four, who were arrested on Monday, for suspected “terrorist association” with the aim of doing criminal harm to a person or persons, confirming a report first given by Le Parisien.
The four suspects are men aged 26 to 38 who were arrested on Monday, PNAT said.
A source close to the case said they were all from Dagestan, but one had French nationality.
Three of them allegedly went in April to the southwestern city of Biarritz — where Osechkin lives — and took video footage that includes images of his home, but not of the dissident himself, according to the source.
The main suspect arrested affirmed they were all on vacation in Biarritz, but their versions had discrepancies, the source said.
Osechkin told AFP that “all is well”, and thanked French counter-terrorism services.
“It’s obvious that if there had not been such a highly professional and competent security service, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s assassins would have killed me long ago,” he said.
French prosecutors in September 2022 opened a probe into alleged death threats against Osechkin but found, “no objective element” to back his claim that someone was trying to kill him.
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Osechkin told AFP at the time he had been at home with his wife and children and working in the dark when he noticed, “a moving red dot on the railing of one of the terraces and then moving towards me on the wall”.
He said he had been informed in February that year of an assassination plot against him and was subsequently put under police protection.
Gulagu.net rose to prominence in 2021 after publishing videos showing rapes in Russian prisons, as well as testimonies from victims and, extremely unusually, from the perpetrators, leading to the opening of an investigation by the authorities.
It claims to have more than 1,000 videos showing torture in Russian jails.