A senior Russian investigative official said he would not care if the European Union banned him from entry over the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
“I don’t have any immediate plans to go abroad,” Alexei Anichin, head of the Interior Ministry’s Investigative Committee, told reporters in Moscow on Thursday. “But if I do go and they don’t let me in, it won’t be a big tragedy for me.”
The European Parliament urged the bloc in December to consider a visa ban on 60 Russian officials allegedly linked to Magnitsky’s death in a Moscow prison in November 2009. The United States and Canada are mulling similar bans.
Asked if he would miss traveling to “old Europe,” Anichin, who is on the list of officials, replied, “No, I won’t.”
Magnitsky, a 37-year-old lawyer for Hermitage Capital, died after almost a year in pretrial detention during which he said he was abused and denied medical treatment to force him to drop fraud allegations against Russian officials.
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