The July 9 arrest of two observers from the CIS-EMO international organization for election monitoring in CIS states, Alexei Kochetkov and Vladimir Lebedkin, was but a provocation staged by the Moldovan authorities, maintains Valery Klimenko, the leader of Ravnopraviye/Patria-Rodina voting bloc.

Today, he convened a news conference in Infotag and described the provocation: while in Bendery, two strangers approached the Russian visitors to chisel a cigarette, and provoked them into a fistfight.

"The Moldovan police interfered and detained the foreigners not the provokers. They were delivered to the Police Commissariat to the neighbor raion - Anenii Noi. They were interrogated by nobody but the Raion Police Commissar himself, which was indeed very strange, the more so during a weekend. The official mass media claimed that forensic experts found alcohol ion their blood, but no blood samples were taken from them for analysis", said Valery Klimenko.

He stated also that the Russian citizens were detained in defiance of the Moldovan and international legislation. The Anenii Noi court was strangely alert and prepared to act instantly, as if waiting for the Russians beforehand. However, the hearings were held in the Romanian language which the foreigners did not know. [In Moldova, practically every person born before independence is bilingual, with many having a fairly good command of the Russian language]. The local judges denied them an interpreter, and left unheard their demand to invite a lawyer, said Valery Klimenko.

He further held nobody cared to catch the above-mentioned provokers, for all that was a mere political trick designed by the Communist authorities "who are seeking to further aggravate the already bad relations with the Russian Federation".

"Kochetkov is already at large and in Moscow, but Lebedkin is still in custody here. He is being demanded - in exchange for an early release -- to confess that he was sent here by Russia to stage provocations in Moldova", said Valery Klimenko.