Alexei Navalny daughter accepts human rights award on his behalf
Geneva, Jun 8: The daughter of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny accepted a human rights award on her father's behalf on Tuesday for his courage in facing down President Vladimir Putin's government.
Daria Navalnaya, a 20-year-old student at Stanford University in California, said her father was dedicating the courage award given by the Geneva Summit for Human Rights to all political prisoners in Russia and Belarus.
You really should be looking at my father instead, but he's in a Russian prison right now simply because of what he says, does and believes in and because he didn't die when the Russian government wanted him to, Navalnaya said in a video message for the online event.
Navalny was arrested in January upon his return from Germany, where he had spent five months recuperating from a nerve agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin accusations that Russian officials dismiss. He was given a 2 1/2-year prison sentence in February for violating terms of a suspended sentence stemming from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that he denounced as politically motivated.
He went on a 24-day hunger strike in prison to protest the lack of medical treatment for severe back pain and numbness in his legs, ending it in April after getting the medical attention he demanded.
Navalny was chosen as this year's recipient for its annual courage award by more than two dozen human rights groups.
His daughter said her father wrote her a letter from behind bars after he was chosen.
In his letter my dad asked me today to give this award to every single political prisoner in Russia and Belarus, Navalnya said.
Also taking part in the event was Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the main challenger in a vote in August in Belarus in which authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko won a sixth term. That victory that was widely seen as rigged.
In a nod to her father's sense of humor, Navalnaya said he wrote in the letter: First and most importantly, please do not screw up your first public performance. And second, don't forget to say how extremely proud I am to receive this high award.
Navalnaya, while active in blogging and standing up for her dad, has rarely made public appearances.
Navalny was given the award for his extraordinary courage and heroic efforts to sound the alarm about the Putin regime's grave violations of the human rights of the Russian people, said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, which co-organizes the event.
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Ranchi: Temple guard bludgeoned to death during robbery attempt, 3 held
Ranchi (PTI): A 60-year-old security guard of a temple in Ranchi was bludgeoned to death with a stone during a robbery attempt, police said on Saturday.
The incident happened late on Thursday at the Jagannath Temple in the Dhurwa Smart City area, they said.
"Three persons were arrested on Friday for killing the security guard. They confessed to the crime and told police that the victim had identified them. Therefore, in fear of being caught, they killed him by attacking him with a stone on his head," SSP Rakesh Ranjan said.
"Thereafter, they took money from the donation box and fled the scene. Two of them have criminal antecedents," he added.
Ranjan said the investigators recovered Rs 3 lakh in cash that had been robbed, the stone with blood-stained marks, and the iron rod used to break open the lock of the donation box kept there.
An FIR in this regard was lodged at the Dhurwa police station, he said, adding that the accused were sent to judicial custody by a court.
