{"id":301428,"date":"2017-03-13T14:20:54","date_gmt":"2017-03-13T14:20:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=301428"},"modified":"2017-03-13T14:20:54","modified_gmt":"2017-03-13T14:20:54","slug":"russian-blogger-on-trial-for-playing-pokemon-game-in-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/2017\/03\/russian-blogger-on-trial-for-playing-pokemon-game-in-church\/","title":{"rendered":"Russian blogger on trial for playing Pokemon game ‘in church’"},"content":{"rendered":"
Russia put a blogger on trial Monday on charges of offending religious believers and fomenting hatred by posting a video online that showed him hunting Pokemons in a church.<\/p>\n
Ruslan Sokolovsky, 22, faces up to seven years in prison over the YouTube video of him zapping Pokemons on a smartphone in a Russian Orthodox church in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg.<\/p>\n
The video which Sokolovsky posted in August 2016 has been viewed more than 1.6 million times on YouTube.<\/p>\n
He has pleaded not guilty in the case which has been compared to that of the Pussy Riot punk art group, whose 2012 “punk prayer” in a Moscow cathedral led to two-year prison terms.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t aim to offend anyone,” Sokolovsky said in court in a video broadcast by Life News, adding that he was ready to apologise if anyone was offended.<\/p>\n
He said he created the videos “with critical and polemical aims”, describing himself as an atheist.<\/p>\n
The Russian Orthodox Church has accused him of blasphemy over the stunt in a church built on the spot where the Bolsheviks shot Russia’s last tsar and his family in 1918.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t ask these people to watch my video clips” Sokolovsky told journalists during a break.<\/p>\n
“Who is the Russian Orthodox Church that I have to publicly repent in front of them?”<\/p>\n
Sokolovsky spent several months in prison ahead of the trial, though he is now under house arrest.<\/p>\n
Amnesty International has condemned the charges against him as “farcical” and called him a prisoner of conscience.<\/p>\n
He also faces a separate charge of illegally possessing a “spy pen” with a recording function, which was found in a search of his flat.<\/p>\n
In court, he said that the pen is widely available to buy and unsuitable for covert recording.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Russia put a blogger on trial Monday on charges of offending religious believers and fomenting hatred by posting a video online that showed him hunting Pokemons in a church. Ruslan Sokolovsky, 22, faces up to seven years in prison over the YouTube video of him zapping Pokemons on a smartphone in a Russian Orthodox church […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[117],"tags":[5005,5006],"yoast_head":"\n