The intervention of the Prince of Wales has almost certainly saved the teenager who attacked him with a bunch of flowers in Latvia last week from a jail sentence. Alina Lebedyeva was arrested in Riga, after she struck him on the cheek with a spray of carnations to protest about the war in Afghanistan, and was told she was looking at 15 years in jail.
St James’s Palace issued a statement saying that Charles, the heir to the British throne, had appealed for clemency for his attacker. “It was an unfortunate but trivial incident which did not affect the Prince of Wales, and we hope and trust that the Latvian authorities will take that into account when looking into this case,” said his spokesman.
Although the police refused to rule out criminal charges, they appeared to be softening, following the hard stance they had first adopted on the teenager, who has since been released. “Having evaluated all the circumstances,” said deputy head of the security police, Didzis Smitins, “and also taking into account that His Royal Highness has expressed a request through his Press people that she should be released, we have changed the form of security applied to her from arrest to police surveillance.”
“We still think she has violated the 87th paragraph of the criminal code,” he continued, “which is assaulting a foreign dignitary,” he continued. “But we will see what the final formulation of charges is, if any, early next week when we submit the case to the prosecutor’s office.”
Alina’s parents had appealed to Charles to intervene in the row surrounding her daughter. Her father Nicolai, a musician, said: “Prince Charles can help her. What she did, I don’t understand, but it would be too harsh to send her to prison for 15 years.”
When St James’s Palace heard about the decision to release the 16-year-old, a spokeswoman said: “We are pleased that the authorities have taken the Prince of Wales’s views into account.”
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
