MOSCOW, October 15 (RIA Novosti) - Finnish police have launched new criminal proceedings against a Russian woman convicted of kidnapping her own son, the woman's spokesman said on Thursday.
Earlier this week, Rimma Salonen was given an 18-month suspended sentence for illegally taking her son Anton, now 6, out of Finland last year.
In April of this year, her ex-husband, Paavo Salonen, took Anton back to Finland with the help of a St. Petersburg-based Finnish diplomat, an incident that sparked an angry response from the Russian government.
The spokesman said that Paavo had accused his former wife of telling Finnish media that he had kidnapped the boy, who has both Russia and Finnish citizenship.
"Finnish diplomats maintain that Paavo legally took the child out of Russia to Finland," he said.
"Paavo told me that he wants to put Rimma in jail. And as Rimma was given a suspended sentence, if she commits even a minor crime, for example, libel, then they can put her away, instantly."
He also called on the Russian authorities to intervene in the situation, which he called a manifestation of "Russophobia."
Salonen, from Russia's Nizhny Novgorod Region, was arrested on Saturday at an airport in the Finnish city of Tampere, where she had traveled to take out 30,000 euros previously frozen in her Finnish account, and to meet with Anton, as well as Nikita, her 19-year-old son from a previous marriage.
