A British YouTube traveler known for his videos exploring post-Soviet countries has been detained at a spaceport in Kazakhstan.
Benjamin Rich, whose Bald and Bankrupt channel has 3.53 million followers, confirmed that he was questioned by police after visiting the Baikonur Cosmodrome, but denied reports that he had been arrested.
Dmitry Rogozin, head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, said in an online publication that Rich and a woman named Alina Tselyupa were detained near one of the launch sites in Baikonur, which Russia is renting from Kazakhstan.
Local authorities are determining the couple’s “exact level of involvement in illegal activities,” said Rogozin, who posted photos of Rich’s visa and Tselupa’s passport.
A woman named Alina has appeared in a number of Rich videos, but it was not immediately clear whether she and Tselyupa are the same person.
Posting later on his Instagram story, Rich denied that he had been arrested, claiming he had been fined instead for not being allowed to see the Buran rocket, a Soviet-era orbital spacecraft similar to the US space shuttle. .
People walk near one of the space shuttles from the Soviet era Buran, installed in the museum of the Baikonur spaceport rented from Russia in Kazakhstan
(AFP via Getty Images)
He said: “I woke up to a lot of messages asking me if I was okay. Apparently people think I’m in the Gulag because of some Twitter post.
“I was generally questioned by the Russian police for a few hours about going to see the Buran rocket without special permission and receiving an administrative fine of £ 60, just like hundreds of foreign adventurers before me.”
Rich said he was not arrested because it is not a criminal offense to lack a permit, “just an administrative offense, which means just a fine, and he was told not to do it again, just like smoking in the wrong place or walking a jay.”
The latest video on Rich’s channel was shot in Syria and released on April 24.
An Instagram post last week referred to “Syrian tanning and [being] back to a country with Soviet mosaics ”, but did not specify where it is located.
The Independent contacted the United Kingdom Office for Foreign Affairs, Community and Development (FCDO) for comment.
Baikonur, once a closed Soviet city, is now open to tourists applying for permission from Roscosmos. It is located in the steppe about 1100 km (680 miles) southwest of the Kazakh capital Nur-Sultan.
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