Pussy Riot's Nadezhda Tolokonnikova Missing Following Prison Transfer

Published Nov 01, 2013

If you thought that Pussy Riot 's plight in prison couldn't get any worse, we're sorry to report that it just did. According to reports, incarcerated member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has gone missing and her family members don't know where she is.It seems that 23-year-old Tolokonnikova was transferred by train on October 21 from a Russian prison in Mordovia. No explanation for the transfer was given, and eye-witness accounts suggest that she was spotted in transit in Chelyabinsk (a city near the Ural Mountains). However, her final destination is currently unknown to the public."No one knows anything," her father Andrei Tolokonnikova told BuzzFeed . "There's no proof she's alive, we don't know the state of her health. Is she sick? Has she been beaten?"While information is scarce, Andrei speculated that Russian officials opted to hide his daughter in order to dissuade protesters from demonstrating at the prison. Nadezhda's husband, Petya Verzilov, said, "They want to cut her off from the outside world."Authorities apparently promised to tell Tolokonnikova's family where she was within 10 days of her being moved, but that time is now up and they're still in the dark.Recent reports suggested that Tolokonnikova was not granted the chance to apply for early release , and she staged a hunger strike. She was initially jailed for staging a political protest at Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral in early 2012.