The Russian prison service says it has moved jailed Pussy Riot musician Nadezhda Tolokonnikova to an isolation cell after she launched a hunger strike over what she called slave labour conditions.
"Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has been placed in a so-called safe place in the colony. It is not a punishment cell," a spokesman for the prison service told the Interfax news agency on Tuesday.
Tolokonnikova, a 23-year-old mother, is serving a two-year sentence in a penal colony in the Mordovia region of central Russia over the Pussy Riot punk band's protest song in a Moscow cathedral last year.
The spokesman said she was in a "single-person cell with comfortable conditions, seven square metres in area, with a sleeping area, fridge and toilet".
The head of a regional prisons watchdog, Gennady Morozov, told the RIA Novosti news agency that Tolokonnikova had been put in a "punishment isolation cell".
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Her lawyer Irina Khrunova told the RAPSI legal news agency that Tolokonnikova confirmed "that she was put in a safe place. She didn't tell me anything about a punishment cell."
On Monday Tolokonnikova declared a hunger strike, complaining that prisoners had to work 17-hour days at a sewing workshop and that she had received a death threat from the deputy governor of her penal colony in Mordovia, a region dotted with former Soviet Gulag prison camps.
Morozov, the chairman of a Kremlin-linked prisoners' rights watchdog for Mordovia, said the prison authorities had moved Tolokonnikova for her safety.
"This is not a punishment, but is done due to Tolokonnikova's statement that she received threats," he said.
He also said prison staff are continuing to bring her food despite her hunger strike.
