Tubbydev

The government agency tasked with regulating the media is seeking to shut down a popular, independent online news agency in the Altai region called Bankfax after an anonymous reader posted a reprint of a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed on its forum and called for the destruction of Islam.

The director of Bankfax, Valery Savinkov, said the anti-Muslim posting appeared to be a pretext, since similar postings can be found on many Russian Internet forums. The authorities, he said, seemed to be using Bankfax as a test case for a wider crackdown on freedom of speech on the RuNet.

« The authorities are testing a model on us on how to punish not those who truly cause offense, but those whom they think should be punished, » Savinkov said by telephone from Barnaul, the capital of Altai.

The head of the Siberian branch of the Federal Service for Media Law Compliance and Cultural Heritage said that Bankfax, like all other media organizations, must be held responsible for the information it disseminates.

« The task of a news agency is to distribute information, and in this case it was distributing an extremist comment, » Gennady Popryga said by telephone from Novosibirsk.

The federal service, known as Rosokhrankultura, has filed a civil case against Bankfax, demanding that it be shut down. The case is scheduled to be heard Friday in a Barnaul court.

On Thursday, Rosokhrankultura issued a warning to another Internet portal, Gazeta.ru, in a similar case involving the caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that set off protests around the world earlier this year.

The case against Bankfax arose after an online user with the nickname « Bratka » posted a scanned page of an Argentinian newspaper showing a reprint of one of the caricatures, with a comment calling for the destruction of Islam.

The posting appeared on the evening of Feb. 17 on a thread discussing the controversy created by the caricatures, which were first printed by a Danish newspaper.

« The comment was posted on a Friday evening, when no one was in the office and could have deleted it, » Savinkov said, adding that usually the online content of the web site is checked every 10 minutes and about 10 comments are deleted every day, usually for offensive language.

On Sunday, Feb. 19, Savinkov was called to the Altai region prosecutor’s office, where he learned about the case being brought against Bankfax by Rosokhrankultura.

The following day, the prosecutors opened their own case and began investigating whether the posting had incited religious hatred. Savinkov is a witness in the criminal case.

A spokesman for the Altai prosecutor’s office, Valery Ziyastinov, said that the person using the nickname Bratka had not yet been identified. If located and found guilty of extremism, Bratka could face up to five years in prison.

« We also need to find out whether the Bankfax moderators could have deleted this post quickly and not waited until prosecutors began asking questions, » he said by telephone from Barnaul.

Savinkov said that Bankfax had passed on to prosecutors Bratka’s IP-address and e-mail address. « This person has posted comments on our web site almost daily for about two years. It should hardly be a problem to find him, » he said.

Savinkov said he did not believe that the posting was a provocation intended to get Bankfax shut down. Rather, Rosokhrankultura seemed to be using the anti-Muslim posting to crack down on the online news portal, which since its creation in 1997 has become one of the most popular in the Altai region. Bankfax gets more than 150,000 visits per month, according to the Rambler counter. It carries a mix of local and national news.

In its warning to Gazeta.ru on Thursday, Rosokhrankultura said the Internet portal had incited religious hatred by posting the images of the Prophet Mohammed.

Gazeta.ru editor Mikhail Mikhalin disagreed, saying the news portal was only striving to reflect an important news development.

Ziyastinov acknowledged that the law on extremism only loosely regulated the Internet, and expressed hope that the Altai case would prod lawmakers to make it more specific.

State Duma deputies have drafted legislation to ban the spread of extremist materials via the Internet and were ready to submit it to the lower house, Pavel Krasheninnikov, head of the Duma Legal Committee, said in January, after a young Muscovite, apparently influenced by anti-Semitic web sites, attacked worshippers in a Moscow synagogue, wounding nine people. The bill has not yet been submitted.