The Russian domestic secret service FSB has accused three Crimean Tatars arrested at the weekend of having carried out an attack on a gas pipeline on the Russian-annexed peninsula on behalf of the Ukrainian military in August.

Among them is Nariman Jeljal, the most important representative of the ethnic group, who stayed there after the Russian invasion in 2014.

Reinhard Veser

Editor in politics.

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He is accused of acting as an intermediary between the Ukrainian military intelligence and the two alleged perpetrators. The two had been instructed in the southern Ukrainian city of Cherson on how to handle the explosives that had been brought from Ukraine to Crimea in July; they had been promised $ 2,000 for the attack. According to Russian media reports, the gas pipeline to a Russian military base was slightly damaged on August 23.

The 41-year-old Nariman Dscheljal is deputy chairman of the Mejlis, the self-organization of the Crimean Tatars founded in 1991, which is banned as extremist in Russia, but is recognized by the Ukrainian state as the only legitimate representation of the Crimean Tatars. The Tatars, who were deported from the Soviet Union to Central Asia in 1944 and were only allowed to return to their homeland at the end of the 1980s, do not recognize the annexation of Crimea by Russia.

Jeljal, who is considered to be the moderate representative of the Crimean Tatars, took part in the meeting of the Crimean Platform in Kiev in August, at which numerous European governments confirmed that Crimea belonged to Ukraine under international law. The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Selenskyj had already called the arrests in Crimea "revenge" for the Crimean platform at the weekend.

According to Jeljal's lawyer, the deputy medschlis chairman was handcuffed and with a sack on his head without food or drink for the first 24 hours after his arrest. She had only received contact with Dscheljal on Sunday morning, who had been picked up at home on Saturday by masked uniformed men. Almost sixty Crimean Tatars who protested against the kidnapping of Jeljal and four other people in the Crimean capital Simferopol on Saturday had been temporarily arrested.