Sapieha’s extradition case was mistakenly transferred to Smolensk
The Moscow Presnensky Court sent a petition from the Federal Penitentiary Service on the transfer of Russian Sofya Sapega, convicted in Belarus, to serve her sentence in Russia for consideration by the Promyshlenny District Court of Smolensk. This was reported to Interfax in a Moscow court on Thursday, June 1.
The court explained this decision by the fact that the last place of registration of Sapieha on the territory of the Russian Federation was in Smolensk. However, the British media company BBC found that that the file was sent to Smolensk by mistake. The prosecution, according to the BBC, confused the girl’s last place of residence in Russia – the street and house indicated in the court decision are located in the Belarusian city of Lida, where she lived before the verdict.
Sofya Sapega’s card from the closed database of AS “Russian Passport”, which the prosecutor’s office presented to the court, indicates that in 2012 the girl lived in Smolensk, on Tukhachevsky Street. Lawyers also found out that in Smolensk, on this street, there is no house number indicated on the prosecutor’s card, but the house with that number is on Tukhachevsky Street in Lida, where Sapega lived with her mother and was serving house arrest before the verdict, BBC point.
Sofia Sapieha Arrest
Sofya Sapieha was arrested in May 2021 in Minsk, together with the former editor-in-chief of the opposition channel Nexta Telegram, Roman Protasevich, after the forced landing of a Ryanair passenger plane, in which they were returning to Vilnius after a vacation in Greece .
In May 2022, the girl was sentenced to six years in a penal colony. A court in Grodno found her guilty of articles about incitement to social hatred and illegal collection and dissemination of data on private life. The Russian woman was ordered to compensate the victims for moral damage – 167.5 thousand Belarusian rubles (more than 5.1 million rubles) and pay court costs in the amount of 7488 Belarusian rubles (more than 232 thousand rubles).
A month later, Sapieha submitted to the administration of the IK-4 colony in Gomel, where she was serving her sentence, a petition to the Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko with a request to release her from the six-year sentence or replace her sentence with a milder one. In January it became known that Sapega had been denied a pardon, and in mid-April she agreed to be extradited to Russia.
Source: DW
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