A rally was held in Grozny against the desecration of the Koran after the incident in Volgograd, where 19-year-old student Nikita Zhuravel burned the holy book near the Cathedral Mosque. Students and employees of budgetary organizations were driven to the action, Kavkaz.Realii writes with reference to several residents of the city.
A student of the Grozny State Oil Technical University named after Millionshchikov told journalists that at the first class they were told that “it is imperative to come to the Press House by two o’clock.” An employee of one of the ministries noted that colleagues did not understand what the rally they were supposed to attend was about.
The people gathered at the rally held portraits of the head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov and posters with the inscriptions “Do not touch the Holy Scriptures!”, “My religion is my life” and others. Speaker of the Chechen parliament Magomed Daudov, who spoke at the rally, repeated the version of the investigation that the rally was allegedly financed by the Ukrainian special services, adding that NATO and Western special services were involved in this.
“In today’s world, when Muslims are surrounded by enemies of our religion, when in any European state the followers of Satanists can burn the Koran, spread all the dirt in the form of LGBT people, we live in Russia, where this is unacceptable,” Mufti of Chechnya Salakh Mezhiev said during a speech.
A day earlier, a meeting was held at the “Heart of Chechnya” mosque, according to the ChGTRK “Grozny”, where about ten thousand believers came to “protest against the burning of the Holy Koran in Volgograd by order of the Ukrainian special services.”
Mikita Zhuravel, suspected of burning the Koran, was detained on May 21. The Russian Investigative Committee claims that the burning video was filmed no later than May 19, 2023 in the area of the Cathedral Mosque on Povorinskaya Street in Volgograd and published “on an Internet portal controlled by the Center for Information and Psychological Operations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”
In fact, the video was widely distributed after it was published in the Morning Dagestan channel. He also appeared on the channel of ex-State Duma deputy Ilya Ponomarev, who has been living in Ukraine for several years. Ponomareva said that Nikita Zhuravel’s act was “disgusting”: “You can never play with the religious feelings of any religion.”
The FSB later released a video of Zhuravel’s detention and interrogation. There are a lot of splices on the record, Mediazona notes. The suspect first attributes the arrest to filming the fighter planes. Then, answering the leading questions of a person behind the scenes, he says that “people from Ukraine” contacted him and “offered some money.”
A criminal case was opened against Zhuravel for insulting the feelings of believers (Part 2 of Article 148 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), the court arrested him for two months and sent him to a pre-trial detention center. His case was transferred to Chechnya, according to the Investigative Committee of Russia, after “numerous appeals” from the inhabitants of the republic with a request to recognize them as victims. At the same time, the committee did not comment in any way on the legality of the transfer of the case from one region to another and the fact that the investigating authorities of Chechnya are regularly accused of torturing detainees and violating investigation procedures.
According to V1.ru, Nikita Zhuravel is a native of Sevastopol, who has been living in Volgograd for the past few years and studying at the Volgograd State Social and Pedagogical University.
