Church Pokemon player faces detention

A court in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg has moved to detain a blogger who was already under house arrest pending trial for playing Pokemon Go in a church.

The Kirovsky district court on Friday ruled that 21-year-old Ruslan Sokolovsky violated the terms of his house arrest because his girlfriend visited him on his birthday.

Investigators have charged the video blogger with inciting religious hatred, the same offence that sent two women from the Pussy Riot punk collective to prison for two years in 2012.

Sokolovsky posted a video on his blog earlier in 2016 showing him playing the smartphone game in a church built on the supposed spot where the family of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, was killed.