MOSCOW, December 21 - RAPSI. Russian environmental activist Suren Gazaryan, who announced last week that he had been placed on the federal wanted list, told Human Rights Watch (HRW) that he had left the country, reads the report published on HRW's website on Friday.

The report reads that Gazaryan's telephone conversation with HRW representatives took place on December 19. "Gazaryan also said that he is currently seeking asylum in a European country," the message reads.

It was previously reported that the police had initiated a criminal case against Suren Gazaryan, a well known environmental activist in the Krasnodar Territory; he faces punishment for allegedly issuing murder threats. Gazaryan maintains he is innocent. He said that on August 2 he had an argument with the security guards of a private facility. After this, according to Gazaryan, one of the guards reported him to the police on threatening to murder him.

Gazaryan already has one three-year suspended court sentence. Investigators said that he and another environmental activist, Yevgeny Vitishko, wrote offensive inscriptions on a fence in a wood in the Krasnodar Territory in November 2011.

The environmental activists said that they wrote on the fence around the villa of Krasnodar Territory Governor Alexander Tkachyov. They said that the forest plot had been illegally taken possession of and that pines on the Red Data List had been cut down in order to construct the villa. The press service of the regions administration said that the villa and the plot of land do not belong to the governor.