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Razvozzhayev 'Disappeared,' Lawyer Says

Opposition activist Leonid Razvozzhayev has disappeared from the Irkutsk prison where he has been incarcerated since January, his lawyer said.

"His whereabouts are unknown to lawyers, relatives, or journalists," Dmitry Agranovsky wrote on his LiveJournal blog on Monday.

On March 11, another lawyer, Vyacheslav Ivanets, came to visit Razvozzhayev in Irkutsk, but prison staff told him that the opposition leader was no longer there and later said that he'd been transferred, Agranovsky said.

According to unofficial information, he said, Razvozzhayev was transferred from Irkutsk to Khabarovsk.

A representative of the Federal Prison Service in Irkutsk said that on March 9 Razvozzhayev was transferred from the Irkutsk prison, though he did not specify where.

"Razvozzhayev was moved on Saturday. To where exactly … we cannot confirm, this is confidential information," Agranovsky quoted a spokesperson as saying.

Leonid Razvozzhayev has been in detention since last October and was transferred to the Irkutsk prison in January as part of an investigation into his alleged theft of 500 hats from a Siberian fur trader in 1997.

Investigators dropped those charges in late January, citing an expired statute of limitations, but Razvozzhayev faces three other criminal charges, including plotting mass riots.

Investigators filed those charges in October against Razvozzhayev and fellow Left Front activists Sergei Udaltsov and Konstantin Lebedev for orchestrating violence at the May rally.

The arrests followed a documentary on NTV television that accused them of using money provided by the Georgian government to fund their plot.

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