A JAILED member of Russia's Pussy Riot punk band has said she has gone on hunger strike to protest against "slave labour" in her penal colony and had received a death threat from a senior prison official.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was sentenced to two years in jail in August 2012 after performing what the band called a "punk prayer" in a Moscow cathedral in a protest against President Vladimir Putin that came amid street protests against his rule.
Tolokonnikova wrote in a letter circulated by her husband that she was going on hunger strike and refusing to participate in the colony's "slave labour" where she said the law treated jailed women "like cattle".
Tolokonnikova is in Penal Colony No.14 in the Mordovia region, southeast of Moscow, where she said inmates were forced to work up to 17 hours a day sewing police uniforms.
Penal colony administrators declined to comment on her accusations.
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