Member of the Public Monitoring Commission of Moscow Evgeny Enikeev has said former serviceman of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, second rank captain in reserve Leonid Parkhomenko, who is accused by Russia of alleged espionage for Ukraine, has gone on hunger strike in the Russian Lefortovo detention center.
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As Enikeev wrote on his blog page, Parkhomenko, who has been kept in the detention center for 20 months, has been on hunger strike for 18 days so far, the Ukrainian news outlet TSN.ua reported.
According to Enikeev, when Parkhomenko was explaining the reasons for his hunger strike to members of the Public Monitoring Commission, saying: "As a result of the investigator's actions, they've started going after my family," Nikolay Vasilyevich Ivanov, the deputy head of the regime and security department, interrupted the speaker and ordered to take Parkhomenko back to the cell.
"During the conversation, Parkhomenko told us that he 'had been beaten against the floor' when he was detained, but Nikolay Vasilyevich Ivanov, the deputy head of the regime and security department, who was present during the conversation, forbade him from telling the details regarding the use of physical force against him," Enikeev said.
As UNIAN reported earlier, Parkhomenko was detained in the strategic port city of Sevastopol on the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula in November 2016. Russia's FSB argued the man had allegedly been collecting intelligence information on fleet operations on the instructions of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.
