New Wave of Searches of Jehovah's Witnesses in Moscow and the Region

On December 5, 2024, at least eight homes of Jehovah's Witnesses were searched in Moscow and Lyubertsy near Moscow. In one of the cases, the security forces used force. Five believers—Zaur Murtuzov, Daria Petrochenko, Liliana Korol, Larisa Kislaya, and Oksana Ivanova—were sent to the temporary detention facility. A criminal case has been initiated.

In the early morning, operational officers of the Investigative Committee and the FSB, accompanied by the National Guard and SOBR, broke into the houses of believers, waking them up with loud knocks on the door. In some apartments, law enforcement officers (numbering from five to eight people, some of them were wearing masks and with weapons) broke down the doors using crowbars and sledgehammers. According to one of the believers, in her case the police turned out to be witnesses.

According to eyewitnesses, the operatives demanded to unlock phones and laptops, provide access to correspondence, threatening criminal prosecution and imprisonment in a pre-trial detention center. One believer was beaten on the head and stomach and his nose was broken. During the searches, foreign passports and electronic devices, flash drives and hard drives, notebooks, postcards, photographs, Bibles, religious books and a Bible atlas were seized. The searches lasted from two to five hours.

Five believers were taken to the Investigative Department for the Southern Administrative District of Moscow, interrogated, and later placed in a temporary detention facility. On the same day, the investigator of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the city of Moscow, Senior Lieutenant of Justice Y. S. Shumilova, charged Zaur Murtuzov with participation in the activities of an extremist organization and involvement in it. This is how the investigation interprets conversations on biblical topics with a woman (Olga Grigorieva), who for two years pretended to be interested in the Holy Scriptures.

To date, 19 Jehovah's Witnesses have been convicted for their faith in Moscow and the Moscow Region, 7 of them are serving time in penal colonies.