Police raid offices of Putin critic in Moscow

Russian police on Tuesday raided the offices of a pro-democracy movement founded by outspoken Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, less than two weeks after investigators accused him of organizing a contract killing.

Khodorkovsky's Open Russia movement said police had also searched some of its employees' apartments in Moscow and St. Petersburg and had taken away documents.

Open Russia, Khodorkovsky's charity foundation, said its employees' homes were raided in the early hours Tuesday in connection with a 2003 criminal case which led to Khodorkovsky's conviction in 2005. Homes of at least seven employees were searched, Open Russia's lawyer Sergei Badamshin said on Twitter. The case originally centered on a 1993 privatization of a fertilizer company.

Russia's chief investigative body confirmed the reports.

Khodorkovsky dismissed the pre-dawn raids as retribution for his political activities. None of the Open Russia employees whose homes were searched worked for him in 1993, he said.

"Some of them were children in 1993," Khodorkovsky said in an interview with the Ekho Moskvy radio.

Khodorkovsky, 52, once Russia's richest man thanks to his then control of the Yukos oil company, likened the raids to repression in the Soviet era, suggesting they were linked to critical comments he had made about Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"The decay had entered its final stage," Khodorkovsky told the Ekho Moskvy radio station. "We are all familiar with this from the time of (Soviet leader Leonid) Brezhnev."

"Everyone who collaborates with Open Russia perfectly understands and understood from the very start that such pressure was not only possible but inevitable,” he added.

Khodorkovsky spent 10 years in prison on tax evasion and embezzlement charges widely seen as punishment for challenging Putin's power. He was pardoned and released in December 2013, shortly before the Winter Games in Sochi. Since then, Khodorkovsky has continued to oppose the Kremlin from exile in Europe.

Earlier this month, Russian police said they had uncovered evidence suggesting Khodorkovsky had ordered the 1998 contract killing of the mayor of an oil-producing town in Siberia and wanted him to stand trial for the alleged crime.

Khodorkovsky denied any involvement. 

Wire services