MOSCOW, April 20 (RAPSI) - The Second Western District Military Court on Monday decided to suspend a case against journalist of the radio Echo of Moscow in Pskov Svetlana Prokopyeva charged with justifying terrorism due to the coronavirus epidemic, lawyer Galina Arapova told RAPSI.

The parties cannot personally take part in the proceedings. The hearings will resume after the sanitary and epidemiological situation is normalized, Arapova said.

On Monday, the court held the first hearing on merits through videoconference.

The case paper read that the journalist voiced on-air an opinion that the state authorities induced the youth to radical actions when discussing the self-destruction of a 17-year student in the premises of the Federal Security Service (FSB) in the city of Arkhangelsk.

The case of Prokopyeva was submitted to prosecutors in late 2019 but it was returned to investigators for further examination.

In October 2019, the Presidential Council for Human Rights applied to a prosecutor in defense of the journalist, stating that her statements could not be recognized as public justification of terrorism.