Jailed Pussy Riot member briefly hospitalised: supporters

Jailed Pussy Riot punk rocker Maria Alyokhina, who has been on hunger strike for the past week, was briefly hospitalised on Tuesday, her supporters said.

“Have just been informed that Alyokhina was admitted for an examination into the prison colony’s medical quarters,” the Voina radical art collective, which is closely associated with the Pussy Riot band, said on Twitter.

An hour later it said Alyokhina was released and granted a meeting with supporters at her prison camp in the Urals city of Berezniki.

Irina Khrunova, a lawyer for Alyokhina and fellow jailed Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, said the prison colony authorities had been keeping a close eye on the 24-year-old since the start of her fast last Wednesday.

“But today the checkup was more detailed,” she told AFP.

Alyokhina said she was going on hunger strike in protest over the authorities’ failure to allow her to attend a parole hearing in person. A court in the Urals the next day rejected her request for parole.

Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were sentenced to two years in prison last August for hooliganism motivated by religious hatred after they performed an anti-Vladimir Putin stunt in a major Moscow cathedral.

Tolokonnikova is serving her sentence in a different prison camp in the central Mordovia region.