France opens probe into ‘threats’ against Russian dissident

French authorities are investigating threats against an exiled Russian dissident who says he reported seeing a laser sight light in a possible assassination bid, prosecutors said on Tuesday.

Vladimir Osechkin, who leads the Gulagu.net NGO that specialises in uncovering abuses in Russian prisons, is a refugee in France and is based in the resort town of Biarritz on its southwest coast.

The regional prosecutors in the neighbouring town of Bayonne said they had already opened a preliminary investigation on March 10 into “death threats” against Osechkin.

These threats were “taken with the utmost seriousness”, the regional public prosecutor Jerome Bourrier said in a statement.

Osechkin, an avowed opponent of President Vladimir Putin, said he was targeted on the evening of September 12 when he was at home with his wife and children and working in the dark.

“I noticed a moving red dot on the railing of one of the terraces and then moving towards me on the wall,” he told AFP by telephone.

“We turned off the light, lay down on the floor, closed the shutters and called the police.”

He added that police and neighbours had heard shots were fired.

– Targeting opponents –

Osechkin said he had been informed in February of an assassination plot against him and was subsequently put under police protection.

He added that 10 days ago he had also received information that a “Russian criminal world boss” had arrived in France on a mission to kill people in the Biarritz area.

A source close to the investigation, who asked not to be named, told AFP that the probe had been opened into “threats” and not into attempted murder.

The source declined to confirm or deny that shots had been fired.

The Bayonne prosecutor emphasised that “no objective element allows us to support the hypothesis that Vladimir Osechkin was last week the target of an assassination attempt.”

Gulagu.net rose to prominence in 2021 after publishing videos showing rapes in Russian prisons, as well as testimonies from victims and, extremely unusually, from the perpetrators, leading to the opening of an investigation by the authorities.

It claims to have more than 1,000 videos showing torture in Russian jails.

Activists and Western governments accuse Russia of being prepared to eliminate opponents abroad, such as the double agent Sergei Skripal, who survived an attempt to kill him with the nerve agent Novichok in 2018. The Kremlin denies the allegations.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted a large number of activists, journalists and intellectuals who oppose the war to leave Russia for European Union states including France.

The Biarritz area has also long been popular with moneyed Russians and Osechkin has since the invasion taken part in actions including against property owned by Putin’s former son-in-law.

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