Russian Art Group, Voina, Claims Attack on Police Van

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MOSCOW — A spokesman for the radical art collective Voina on Monday announced that its members had broken into a St. Petersburg police station on New Year’s Eve and used gasoline bombs to incinerate a police vehicle used to transport prisoners as “a gift to all political prisoners of Russia.” Amateur video posted online showed a figure tossing lighted objects under a large vehicle, which was then engulfed in flames and spewed smoke into the night sky.

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The St. Petersburg police responded skeptically to the Voina claims, releasing a statement that described the fire damage to the vehicle as “insignificant” and noting that there were similar rumors of arson after a fire in August that forensics specialists determined had been caused by a short circuit.

Voina, which was founded by a Moscow philosophy student in 2005, won a contemporary art award sponsored by Russia’s Ministry of Culture for a 2010 work that consisted of a 210-foot penis painted on the roadway of a St. Petersburg drawbridge, which rose to point at the offices of the F.S.B., the state security service. Its members went on to a project they called “Palace Revolution,” in which teams of men ran up to parked police cars and flipped them over, in what they described as a protest against police corruption.

The group’s activities dropped off in 2010 after two of its leaders were arrested on serious hooliganism charges; both men were released last spring on bail, with the assistance of $20,000 donated by the British street artist known as Banksy. The charges, which could bring seven-year sentences, still stand. A third member has been in detention on vandalism charges since taking part in a protest on Dec. 6 and is on a hunger strike, Aleksei Plutser-Sarno, the group’s spokesman, said by e-mail.

All day, liberals bickered online over whether the arson attack on the police vehicle constituted “pure art,” as one commentator put it, or, as another maintained, “an act as idiotic as voting for United Russia,” the ruling party.

Andrei V. Yerofeyev, a prominent intellectual who has championed Voina in the past, said he thought that the group had helped awaken a more activist spirit in the Russian populace, and that it should move away from radical political acts like the burning of the police vehicle.

“The goal of art is deeper than activism,” he said. “They have carried out their assignment.”

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Conflicting Reports of Attack on Iraq’s Finance Minister, Rafe al-Essawi

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But on Monday, no one seemed to be able to agree on any of the details of the attack against the official, Finance Minister Rafe al-Essawi, or even whether it had happened at all. Not for the first time, the facts seemed to be scrambled by Iraq’s growing political and sectarian discord.

Security forces from the Salahuddin Operations Command, which answers to the Shiite-led government in Baghdad, denied that there had been any attack in Salahuddin Province, a largely Sunni area that is home to a renowned Shiite shrine and includes Saddam Hussein’s hometown. A security official at the command said officials “didn’t witness any security breach.”

But two hours later, the local police in Salahuddin contradicted that account, and accused the operations command of “hiding” the incident.

Mr. Essawi himself was in no doubt. He said in a telephone interview that he and a few other Iraqi politicians were returning to Baghdad from a funeral when a blast slammed their convoy outside the holy city of Samarra. Mr. Essawi, who has been an outspoken critic of Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, said he did not know whether the bombing was an assassination attempt aimed specifically at him. But he quickly laid blame for the bombing on the government, which is struggling to keep a lid on terrorist attacks and politically motivated violence in the country.

“With such a violated security situation, it could happen to everyone,” Mr. Essawi said.

The contradictory accounts were reminiscent of late November, when news of a suicide car bombing just outside Iraq’s Parliament was swamped by competing narratives. Immediately after the blast, a spokesman for the Sunni speaker of Parliament, Osama al-Nujaifi, said the attack appeared to be an attempt to assassinate Mr. Nujaifi. A few days later, a security spokesman said on television that the true target was Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite.

Within weeks of that disputed attack, a long-running feud between Mr. Maliki and his political opponents erupted into one of the country’s worst political crises in years, one that has exposed sectarian tensions and raised worries that Mr. Maliki was consolidating power against his rivals now that American military forces have withdrawn from Iraq.

The Sunni vice president has fled to the Kurdish north to avoid arrest on terrorism charges, and Mr. Maliki is trying to oust the deputy prime minister, another Sunni. Iraqiya, a political coalition with wide Sunni support, is boycotting Parliament, and so far Mr. Maliki and the Iraqiya bloc’s leaders have been unable to even agree to talk about the crisis.

Mr. Essawi, a former hospital director from Anbar Province in the western Sunni heartland, has been a central figure in the political furor. He has called for Mr. Maliki to be replaced and is refusing to attend meetings of Iraq’s cabinet — moves that have prompted the prime minister to try to push him aside.

On Monday, Mr. Nujaifi, another Iraqiya leader, made a televised speech warning of the deteriorating human rights picture in Iraq, marked by arbitrary arrests and abuses, and accused Mr. Maliki of using the security forces to advance his political interests.

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Samarra, Iraq.

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