SIMFEROPOL. Oct 4 (Interfax) - The Kievsky district court in Simferopol on Tuesday evening ordered that 48-year-old Renat Suleimanov, suspected by Russian security services of having set up the Crimean cell of Tablighi Jamaat movement (banned in Russia), be arrested for two-months.
"They have arrested him for a month and 26 days. He has pled not guilty," the suspect's lawyer Edem Semedlyayev told Interfax.
The court also chose a restraining measure for three other suspects in the case: Talyat Abdurakhmanov, Arsen Kubedinov and Seiran Mustafayev. Abdurakhmanov and Kubedinov have been detained for almost two months; Mustafayev has been placed under house arrest, the court told Interfax.
Unlike the other suspects, Mustafayev only has an assigned lawyer, his relatives have refused other defense attorneys, an informed source told Interfax.
It was reported that that on October 2 officers from the Federal Security Service branch in Crimea detained four local residents on suspicion of setting up, and being members in, a Tablighi Jamaat cell. Searches were carried out in Simferopol and the Simferopol and Belogorsk districts.
All suspects are Crimean Tartars. The oldest one, Abdurakhmanov, is 64 years old, his lawyers said.
The Jamaat Tabligh religious movement was founded in India in 1926 by Muhammad Ilyas. Opponents see it as an international closed organization that coordinates radical Sunni extremists.
In 2009, the Russian Supreme Court declared the movement extremist and banned it, having deemed its local operations a "threat to inter-ethnic and inter-faith stability in Russian society, to the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation."