Pussy Riot Members Released

The two imprisoned members of the punk group Pussy Riot walked free Monday under a presidential amnesty. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina were freed after serving nearly 21 months of a two-year sentence for hooliganism. They were jailed for performing a “punk prayer” in Moscow’s main Christ the Savior cathedral in protest at Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012. Tolokonnikova, 25, shouted “Russia without Putin” as she left the prison hospital in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, where she had been receiving medical treatment after staging a hunger strike at her previous jail over conditions for inmates. Alyokhina was released earlier in the day from her penal colony in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region. She criticized the presidential amnesty as a “profanation” that only applied to a small minority of convicts.

http://en.ria.ru/russia/20131223/185847878/Pussy-Riot-Protester-Freed-From-Prison-Under-Amnesty.html