Moscow prosecutors on Monday began a check into allegations of extremism lodged against Nezavisimaya Gazeta, after the opposition newspaper published an article last month by jailed former Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
The check was initiated following a complaint by State Duma Deputy Sergei Abeltsev. The Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker said he found elements of extremism in Khodorkovsky's March 3 commentary, the newspaper said on its web site.
Khodorkovsky, who is serving an eight-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion convictions in 2005, is set to testify this week in a second case that could see him sentenced to more than 22 years in prison.
In the Nezavisimaya Gazeta article, titled "Authorized Violence," Khodorkovsky harshly criticized Russia's judicial system, which he said threatened the government's stability.
In a letter to Khodorkovsky published March 10 on his web site, Abeltsev wrote that the imprisoned tycoon insulted the people working in the Federal Prisons Service and called for violence.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta said the allegations were ungrounded and that Abeltsev's complaint misleadingly extracted quotes from the article.
Konstantin Remchukov, Nezavisimaya Gazeta's editor, told Interfax that he thought the check was directed mostly against Khodorkovsky. "Prosecutors want to figure out how, while in prison, he can give interviews, write articles and then publish them," he said.
Later Monday, Remchukov told Interfax that prosecutors had not found reason to charge the newspaper, but that a final decision was pending.
Prosecutors have not commented.
The complaint was not Abeltsev's first against journalists. In 2008, he filed a defamation suit against satirist Viktor Shenderovich, who called him a "Yahoo animal" on his talk show. Shenderovich was cleared of the charges last summer.
If prosecutors find Khodorkovsky's article extremist, it could lead to a third criminal case against him.
Meanwhile, Khodorkovsky was expected to testify as early as Tuesday in the second Yukos trial in Moscow's Khamovnichesky District Court. After more than a year of hearings, prosecutors have rested their case.
On Monday, defense lawyers for Khodorkovsky and his former partner, Platon Lebedev, filed several petitions, including one asking to replace presiding judge Viktor Danilkin for bias. He refused to dismiss himself.
Separately, the Moscow City Court on Monday rejected an appeal of former Yukos manager Alexei Kurtsin's conviction. He was sentenced in January to 15 1/2 years in jail for embezzling 49 million rubles ($1.7 million) from the oil company.
Former Yukos lawyer Svetlana Bakhmina, released on parole last year, has resumed work as a lawyer at a Moscow firm run by her friends, she told Ogonyok magazine in a rare interview published Monday.
Despite the five years she spent in custody and jail, Bakhmina said she did not regret having worked for Yukos, which provided her "life experience."