November 16, 2007	Friday	Ziqa’ad 05, 1428

MOSCOW, Nov 15: A small liberal party in Russia said on Thursday that it had asked the Supreme Court to prevent President Vladimir Putin from running in parliamentary elections next month because of an alleged dirty tricks campaign.

SPS party leader Nikita Belykh accused Putin, a candidate for the ruling United Russia party in the Dec2 polls, of being behind a series of police raids on SPS offices around the country.

“Yesterday we filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court asking that Putin be struck from the list of candidates for having violated the law,” he told journalists.

Belykh said that raids had been carried out in Voronezh, Samara and Saint Petersburg, and that 15m SPS newspapers had been confiscated. In another incident, a bribe was offered to attempt to persuade an SPS member to renounce his candidacy in the northern city of Arkhangelsk.

Ten people have left the race out of fear for “their businesses and their families,” he said.

“This political operation would be impossible without the tacit accord of the person at the head of the power agencies — that is President Vladimir Putin,” Belykh said.

SPS is one of a handful of surviving liberal parties in Russia.

—AFP