France has charged four people over a suspected plot against a Russian dissident, prosecutors said Friday, after a refugee who helped reveal abuses in Russian prisons said he was targeted.
Axar.az informs, citing France 24, Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian living in France who leads Gulagu.net, a non-governmental organisation that specialises in uncovering Russian abuses, told AFP he was the target "of these gangsters, these killers".
France's PNAT national anti-terrorism prosecutor's office has declined to name him, but said it had charged four men aged 26 to 38 with forming a "terrorist association" aiming to harm a person or persons, and was holding them in custody.
It 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 the details to the domestic intelligence service, leading to the four men being arrested on Monday.
A source close to the case said they were all from Dagestan, in the Russian North Caucasus, but one had French nationality.
Osechkin told AFP late on Thursday that he was well, and thanked French counter-terrorism services for saving him from individuals he described as President Vladimir "Putin's assassins".
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.