Twenty masked special and plain clothes police raided an evening seminar at a church in Izhevsk, the capital of the Udmurtia autonomous republic in Russia.
According to the Forum 18 News Service, police forced about 70 people outside the Work of Faith church April 14, calling them "sectarians" and "prostitutes," while they searched the building.
Nearly 50 church members were held for five hours at the police station and fingerprinted. Udmurtia's interior ministry claimed the Pentecostals had "distorted" details of the raid.
Pentecostal bishop Yuri Degtyar told Forum 18 he believes the public prosecutor now has things under control and that the investigation into police conduct during the raid will be "objective."
"The public prosecutor's response was pro-active," he said Thursday from Izhevsk, about 700 miles east of Moscow. "They have taken control of the situation."
On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Slavic Centre for Law and Justice questioned how, before the investigation had even started, Udmurtia public prosecutor Boris Sarnayev could announce to the press that "no police action aimed at humiliating people on religious grounds has been established."
Twenty masked special and plain clothes police officers burst into premises owned by its affiliate church, Word of Faith, on the evening of April 14, breaking through a side gate although the main gates were open, the national Pentecostal union headed by Bishop Sergei Ryakhovsky reported in a statement.
Shouting "Quick! We'll break your legs!" the officers directing the operation – one of whom was said to be drunk and brandishing a pistol – reportedly forced the approximately 70 people present, including pastors, worshippers and seminar participants, to stand facing an outside wall for approximately half an hour while both they and the building were searched.
According to the union, the officers told Pastor Mikhail Russkikh that no search warrant was required after 6 p.m. and repeatedly called church members "sectarians" and "prostitutes," before detaining 46 of those present in a single cell at the local police station for approximately five hours.
The Pentecostal Union statement says the detainees were interrogated individually, fingerprinted and photographed, some were told to sign blank witness statements, and one was hit when he refused to answer questions. No formal police charges were reportedly made.
On Monday, the Interfax news agency reported a spokesman for Udmurtia's department of the Interior Ministry, which includes the police force, insisted the Pentecostal Union had "distorted" events and vowed his department would file suit against "a number of organizations and citizens" circulating information about the incident in the media if it proved unconfirmed by the public prosecutor's investigation.
Asked Thursday how precisely the Pentecostal union statement had distorted events, a press spokesman at Udmurtia's Interior Ministry department directed Forum 18 to a Monday statement on the Udmurtia state authorities' official website.
The statement maintained that an Izhevsk district public prosecutor had issued a warrant for an urgent search of the church's premises in connection with the April 9 discovery not far from the building of a murdered man.
The statement also claimed that both the murdered man and a man accused of the murder had lived at the church's premises from 2003 onwards. The murderer had placed his victim's possessions at the church's premises and told police that a number of people with previous convictions lived there without registration.
This, according to the statement, led to the April 14 search and detention of 46 people, against 22 of whom administrative charges were brought for not having registration. [Russian citizens are required by law to register at any locality where they stay for more than 90 days.]
Bishop Degtyar insisted that only 12 people present at the church's premises did not have registration, being participants in Word of Faith's ex-convict rehabilitation project.
"These twelve are people with difficult pasts trying to change their lives," he told Forum 18. "This was the only administrative violation, but it doesn't warrant police in masks scaring us all – there are civilized ways of conducting searches."
In addition, he said, no mention of the murder investigation was made until several days after the search, and no one was questioned about it during the police interrogation.
"The questions were rather: 'Why do you go to this church and not an Orthodox church?', 'How much money do you donate to your church?'"
In a statement published on the Slavic Centre for Law and Justice website Tuesday, Degtyar also explained that the man accused of the murder had last been seen at the church's rehabilitation centre approximately 18 months ago and that the church had unfortunately not known he was using a false identity or was wanted by police in other parts of the country, "otherwise we would have turned him in to the law-enforcement agencies ourselves."
The murder victim had also not been seen at the centre for a long time, maintained the statement.
Work of Faith Church runs a number of social projects assisting the homeless, orphans and low-income families in addition to former convicts.
"We are working to change society for the better," Degtyar told Forum 18. "We want it to be healthy and strong."
In July 2001, Dmitry Mafenko, then leader of the church's anti-drugs project, was kidnapped with his assistant Pavel, and the pair have not been seen since.
While acknowledging that local drug dealers are opposed to the church's activity, Degtyar stressed to Forum 18 that there was no connection between this kidnapping and the April 14 raid, which he put down to "local police arbitrariness."
The church previously has had no conflict with the police, he added: "We pray for the authorities – the incident was completely unexpected, and many people are still in shock about it."