WASHINGTON, November 20 (By Carl Schreck for RIA Novosti) – Maggy Willcox stayed up all night in bed watching a live Internet feed of Wednesday’s bail hearing nine hours away in St. Petersburg for her husband, a Greenpeace activist awaiting trial for a protest at an Arctic Sea oil rig.
But when it came time for the judge to announce whether ship captain Peter Willcox would be released on bond, the feed cut out.
“I was yelling in frustration and restraining myself from hurling the computer across the room,” Maggy Willcox, who lives on the island of Ilesboro off the coast of Maine, told RIA Novosti on Wednesday.
Peter Willcox is one of two US citizens facing up to seven years in prison for his part in a September protest by Greenpeace activists in which they attempted to scale an Arctic Sea oil platform owned by an affiliate of Russian energy giant Gazprom.
After her Internet feed of Wednesday’s hearing blacked out, Maggy Willcox managed to get through to a Greenpeace official in New York City who informed her that her husband had been granted bail set at 2 million rubles ($60,000).
“I’m happy, of course. I’m happy that his conditions are better. We still have a ways to go. But this is definitely good news and a move in the right direction,” she told RIA Novosti.
The group of 28 Greenpeace activists and two reporters were jailed after the protest against offshore drilling in the environmentally sensitive area, and they were initially charged with piracy. That charge was later downgraded to hooliganism, which is punishable by a maximum sentence of seven years in jail.
Peter Willcox, who captained the Arctic Sunrise icebreaker that transported the protesters to the oil rig, was among the 20 people from the group who had been granted bail by Wednesday evening.
The other US national awaiting trial, crew member Dmitri Litvinov, also holds a Swedish passport. He is so far not among the activists granted bail, according to a list posted on the Greenpeace website Wednesday.
Greenpeace said earlier in the day that it had already posted bail for nine people, and Maggy Willcox said the environmental group told her that her husband was among those whose bond had been paid.
The first of the protesters, Brazilian activist Ana Paula Alminhana Maciel, was released from pretrial detention Wednesday evening in St. Petersburg, but Greenpeace and Maggy Willcox said paperwork could delay the others’ release for several days.
Maggy Willcox said that the conditions at the St. Petersburg jail appear to be more comfortable than the detention facility in Murmansk where her husband was initially held, but that her husband preferred Murmansk because he had a cell to himself and was not surrounded by “Russian-speaking smokers.”
“He’s sharing a cell in St. Petersburg. So in that sense it was less pleasing to him,” she said, adding that she last spoke to her husband on November 1.
Maggy Willcox said she has been in regular contact with US consular officials in Russia who have been assisting her husband, and that the diplomats have reported a relaxing of conditions of his incarceration.
Two US officials who visited him in the St. Petersburg jail on Monday told her that “for the first time they were allowed to just sit in a regular room without a guard and without an interpreter and spend an hour with him,” she told RIA Novosti.
She said that during the live Internet feed on Wednesday, she managed to see her husband in the courtroom cage talking to an interpreter and also a tattooed wedding ring on his finger when he put his hands on the outside of the bars. She has a matching tattoo.
“Someone zoomed in on his hand with his wedding ring, so that pleased me personally,” she said, adding that it was not only the blackout of the courtroom feed that frustrated her during the hearing.
“I was also chastising the person behind the camera who was filming anything other than my husband.”
