Tarja Koivumäki, an Eurovision fan who had to come to Moscow to see the contest was amongst the arrested today with her 25-year-old daughter and another woman. She tells in Helsingin Sanomat: We arrived to the original meeting place to show our solidarity for gay rights. We didn't know it had been removed to another place but there were a lot of police and closed streets. We were standing in a street corner when a group of Russian Mothers Organization people started hitting us with sticks and spitting on us. It seemed like the police were arresting people randomly, I heard them saying "these must be those" and the police arrested us. Me and my daughter were taken to one police car and the other woman to another. When reporting this to Helsingin Sanomat she was on the phone while three police men were writing down their info and she had no idea what was going to happen to them. They all had tickets to tonight's final. She told there were at least six Russian with them who were arrested. The police never informed them about their rights, offered a translator or a lawyer. Luckily Koivumäki speaks some Russian. They wanted to know why they were in that square and why foreign TVs were interviewing them.
After 2,5 hours or interrogation the two women were released and started looking for the third one. She wasn't in the police station they were told she was taken to. Later they were told she had been released, too.No comment.
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