An unidentified man attacked him at a local market where Andrei was buying food for his birthday party. According to A. Zatoka, he didn’t even have time to react and in an instance two police officers appeared in front of him and took him to the police station.

He was placed in the detention cell of the municipal Interior office. First it was communicated that he would be arrested for 15 days on vandalism charges. Later it was made known that according to medical records he had concussion and a hand fracture. Later criminal charges were initiated against him for inflicting bodily injuries of medium severity.  According to his friends who were keeping vigil at the police unit until 1:00 a.m., Andrey may face a 5-year imprisonment term taking into account his previous criminal record.

Last time, in December 2006, A. Zatoka was also detained on vandalism charges and initially he faced several days in detention, but received a suspended sentence of 4 years. In the autumn of 2006 he was among several hundreds of other convicts who had been pardoned. However, he was barred from leaving the country.

Since that time Andrei has repeatedly tried to obtain permission from the authorities to allow him to leave the country to see his family who reside in Russia, but he was repeatedly denied exit. 

Despite the fact that Andrey Zatoka is a Russian citizen, the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Ashgabat did not try to protect the rights of their fellow country man neither during the previous trial or court hearing nor during his numerous attempts to obtain an exit permit from Turkmenistan. It is likely that under these circumstances the Embassy will behave in the same manner.

А.Zatoka is the last widely-known civil society activist who was arrested under S. Niyazov’s presidency. He was convicted under the new country’s leadership. Back then, many attributed his mild (suspended) term of imprisonment to the fact that the new authorities had sought to create an image of reformers. It appears that in the meantime, almost three years later, they decided to сonvict him without looking back at the opinion of the international community, which gave credit to the reform-driven policy allegedly pursued by the Turkmen authorities. It may be stated that in this case the recurrence can be explained not by A. Zatoka’s actions (to be more precise, the lack of actions), but actions by the authorities of Turkmenistan.