Russia detains shaman on mission to 'banish Putin'

Russian police on Thursday said they had detained a Siberian shaman trekking towards Moscow on a mission to expel "demon" President Vladimir Putin, picking up a crowd of supporters on the way.

Police in the eastern Siberian region of Buryatia told Interfax they had detained Alexander Gabyshev, the shaman, on a highway near Lake Baikal and would put him on a flight back to his home region where he is "wanted for committing a crime".

Gabyshev's eccentric bid to walk from his home city of Yakutsk to Moscow, a distance of some 5,000 kilometres (3,000 miles), has seen a group of followers join him on the way.

His simply expressed statements about Putin captured public attention, prompting opposition protests as well as a sharp response from the authorities and muck-raking reports on pro-Kremlin television.

"God said that he's a demon," Gabyshev told the TV Rain channel in July.

"Nature doesn't like him. Where he is, there are cataclysms and acts of terror."
Asked about the shaman, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists that "the Kremlin cannot be aware of criminal prosecution of every Russian citizen, that would be impossible."