Pussy Riot member ends 11-day hunger strike

Maria Alyohkina, an imprisoned member of Russian punk activist band Pussy Riot, has ended a hunger strike after 11 days.

Alyokhina ended the strike when prison authorities met her demands, according to the Huffington Post. She believed that officials at her Ural Mountains prison colony tried to turn other inmates against her with a new, stricter security protocol.

The prison’s inmates were required to wait for up to an hour for prison guards to escort them from their workplace.

The husband of a Pussy Riot bandmate, Pyotr Verzilov, told the Associated Press on Saturday that the prison had reinstated the old security protocol.

"They organized an 'excursion' for Maria today, where she was shown that all her demands, like removing metal locks from doors and easing 24-hour surveillance on certain inmates were met," said Verzilov, according to the Chicago Tribune.

“It seems the public reaction (to the strike) was so big, that there was a political decision (to meet these demands),” he continued.

Alyokhina, along with two other members of Pussy Riot, was convicted of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred in August after a video of their demonstration in church went viral. The trial has been widely seen by Putin’s opponents and other countries as part of a crackdown on political dissent by Putin’s administration.

Image: WikiCommons

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