Russia activist told 'confess or your children die'

A Russian opposition activist has said he was abducted from Ukraine, apparently by Russian special services, and tortured into confessing to a plot against President Vladimir Putin, a report said Wednesday.

Leonid Razvozzhayev, who is now being held in a Moscow prison after investigators said he freely confessed, told rights activists who visited him in detention that he was tortured and his family threatened, the New Times weekly reported on its website.

With details worthy of a thriller, Razvozzhayev's alleged kidnapping came after he was named as a suspect in a probe into a television show which claimed that protest organisers were plotting an uprising with foreign funding.

Razvozzhayev, 39, an aide to a Russian opposition parliamentary deputy, spoke to a public group that monitors prisons whose members include a New Times journalist, Zoya Svetova, in an interview in his isolation cell on Tuesday evening.

He claimed he was bundled into a van by masked men in Kiev, where he had been seeking asylum.

The UN refugee agency on Tuesday said it was "deeply concerned" after Razvozzhayev disappeared on Friday during a lunch break as he consulted a legal NGO.

However Razvozzhayev said he was kidnapped a day earlier on Thursday, according to the New Times.

Razvozzhayev said he was taken across the Russian border and tortured in a dilapidated house where he was held in the cellar, his legs taped up, handcuffed and not given food or drink or taken to the toilet for two days.

"All the interrogations took place in a cellar. I was in a mask and a hat pulled over my face without slits," he was quoted as saying.

"They told me: if you don't answer our questions, your children will be killed."

He said he confessed to the allegations after the men said they would otherwise inject him with a "truth serum" that could leave him permanently disabled.

He said he signed the confession while in handcuffs and was also filmed making the confession.

"All that I wrote in my so-called confession was written under pressure," he said in a dramatic account.

Russian investigators announced Monday that Razvozzhayev had confessed after giving himself up and being arrested.

A Russian news website posted footage of the activist shouting as he was taken from court that he had been kidnapped and tortured.

On Wednesday, the Investigative Committee stressed that Razvozzhayev had not made any official complaint of torture although it said it would check what he said outside court and in media reports.

"His words need to be checked but everything he said was convincing," rights activist Valery Borshchev, who was among those to visit the activist in jail, told independent TV Dozhd station.

Razvozzhayev is an assistant to Ilya Ponomaryov, a deputy for A Just Russia party who is one of the most prominent speakers at protest rallies.

He himself is a member of the Left Front radical movement, whose shaven-headed leader Sergei Udaltsov is also a key figure in mass anti-Putin protests. He calls himself a "professional revolutionary" on Facebook.

Razvozzhayev was charged on Tuesday, and investigators have said they plan to charge Udaltsov in the same criminal case on Friday.

The case centres around claims aired on the pro-Kremlin NTV channel that Udaltsov and the others were planning to stage uprisings across Russia, financed by a Georgian lawmaker, based on hidden camera footage.

Udaltsov has denied the allegations as "the delirium of a lunatic", as has the Georgian lawmaker, Givi Targamadze.