Moscow police paid an unexpected visit today to American journalist Michael Bohm, allegedly to check his residence documents.
Bohm has lived and worked in Moscow for about 20 years. Until 2014, he edited the opinion pages of The Moscow Times. He is a regular guest on Russian TV talk shows.
St. Petersburg’s Channel Five television station falsely reported earlier on Thursday that Bohm had been detained for "lacking Moscow registration” without specifying a source.
"There were two policemen in uniform and two plainclothes officers who were from the Migration Service," Bohm wrote in a Facebook post.
The police asked the journalist to come with them to the station "which I did," he said. "I am law-abiding. Everything was done without handcuffs or [my] 'face down on the floor.’”
Once at the station, Bohm said he was asked to write an explanation, which he found pointless as he said: "there were no violations on my part."
"I have registration (reports in the media that wrote that I don’t have registration are incorrect).”
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow said they had seen the media reports but had no comment "due to issues of confidentiality,” the RBC business portal reported.
