The mother of imprisoned Israeli Na’ama Issachar was allowed to see her daughter in Russian prison on Friday, Channel 12 reports.
“She wants her life back,” said her mother, Yafa, “it was a difficult meeting.”
Issachar was flying from India back home to Israel via Moscow when the Russian authorities found in her luggage a small amount of cannabis.
Despite the fact her luggage was being moved from one plane to the other, with her not being able to reach it from the airport, she was arrested for smuggling drugs into the Russian Federation and sentenced to seven years in prison.
In Israel, the arrest and sentencing are widely seen as a Russian attempt to keep an Israeli citizen as a bargaining chip for the return of Russian citizen and alleged hacker Alexei Burkov. Burkov himself was arrested while on vacation in Israel when he entered the country from Egypt. He is wanted in the US for alleged credit card fraud on a massive scale. In Israel, it is believed that the Russians are interested in preventing his extradition to the US.