Russian investigators have charged three more Greenpeace campaigners with piracy over their Arctic protest at a state-owned oil rig, the environmental group says.
The 30 crew members from Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise ship, 26 of them foreign nationals, including an Australian, have all been remanded in custody for two months and on Wednesday, 14 of them were charged with piracy.
Piracy by an organised group carries a punishment of between 10 and 15 years in Russia.
On Thursday, investigators charged three more crew members, including activists from Denmark and New Zealand.
"The investigators do not leave any room for intrigue. Today three activists have been charged with piracy," Greenpeace Russia wrote on Twitter.
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It appears likely that all 30 will be treated the same, even though those detained include support staff and a freelance photographer and videographer as well as activists.
Greenpeace, which on Wednesday called the charges an "outrage", said that all activists not yet charged had been summoned to investigators on Thursday, suggesting they could all be indicted that day.
The lawyers of all 30 activists have filed appeals against the court decisions to hold them in detention, a spokeswoman for Murmansk's Lenin district court told the RAPSI legal news agency.
Mikhail Fedotov, the chairman of the presidential council on human rights, an advisory body, told the Interfax news agency on Thursday that there was "not the slightest basis" for the piracy charge.
President Vladimir Putin has said that in his opinion, the activists were not pirates but had breached international law.
The group held a September 18 protest in which several activists scaled Gazprom's Prirazlomnaya oil platform in the Barents Sea in protest at plans for drilling in the pristine Arctic.
Russian border guards then landed on the Dutch-flagged vessel from a helicopter and locked up the crew and towed the icebreaker to the northern city of Murmansk, beyond the Arctic Circle.
The activists are being held in pre-trial detention centres in Murmansk and the nearby town of Apatity.
A regional prisoners' rights activist told AFP this week that the activists were complaining of their holding conditions, including chilly cells, chain-smoking fellow prisoners and struggling to communicate with guards, hardly any of whom speak English.
Greenpeace held a similar protest at the same oil platform last year without incurring any punishment.
