Pussy Riot Singer No Longer MIA

Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, whose whereabouts were a mystery for 26 days, has been found. Over a year into her two-year jail term, the Russian singer and activist is currently being held at a prison hospital in western Siberia, according to her husband, Pyotr Verzilov.

In late September, Tolokonnikova was hospitalized during a weeklong hunger strike. On Oct. 21, she was moved from Penal Colony No. 14 in Mordovia and seemed to go off the map until Thursday, when Verzilov announced that she is undergoing medical tests at Tuberculosis Hospital No. 1 in Krasnoyarsk.

The 24-year-old member of the feminist punk group was convicted in August 2012 and charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred after taking part in a protest against Russian President Vladimir Putin at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior earlier that year. Her fellow jailed Pussy Riot member Yekaterina Samutsevich was released in October after an appeal, but Tolokonnikova’s own appeal attempt wasn’t successful.

Here’s more from Verzilov via the BBC:

But he added that she does not have tuberculosis.

Mr Verzilov said his wife had told him that conditions at the hospital were much better than at the penal colony in Mordovia, where she had been held previously, and that she had not been beaten during the 26 days she was missing.

Russian prison authorities issued a statement confirming that “convict Tolokonnikova has arrived to the institution of the Russian prison service in the Krasnoyarsk region”.

–Posted by Kasia Anderson