Alexander Klokov, the chain-smoking chief prosecutor in this quiet Russian backwater, says he cannot explain why, but Kovrov city council is a hornet’s nest of criminals.

Over the past two years, eight of the 21 council members have been in prison, awaiting trial or fresh from jail. It has made Kovrov, a city of 150,000 half a day’s drive east of Moscow, something of a phenomenon.

The councillors themselves say there is a simple explanation: they dared to criticise Kovrov’s mayor and now he is punishing them by fabricating criminal cases with the help of corrupt police, prosecutors and judges.

Kovrov may be an extreme example but critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin say officials everywhere are abusing the justice system to sideline political threats.

What happened to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil tycoon jailed for fraud and tax evasion who says he was the victim of a political witch-hunt, is now being repeated in Kovrov and other towns and cities across the country, say the critics.

“The problem is much wider than just the small town of Kovrov,” said Alexander Petrov, deputy director in Russia of New York-based Human Rights Watch. “It is part and parcel of the very same system of integrated power that President Putin has been building recently,” he said.

Irina Tabatskova, a 44-year-old mother of five children who sits on the city council, chuckles as she lists the charges on which she is standing trial.

Prosecutors allege she took part in a conspiracy to bribe a fellow councillor and stole a crate of mandarins from an orphanage, Tabatskova said at the local newspaper where she works as a journalist.

“Before this, none of us had any criminal convictions. The moment we became councillors we ... became fraudsters, thieves and killers,” she joked.

Tabatskova said the problems started when she and fellow councillors accused Kovrov mayor Vyacheslav Arsentyev of corrupt ties to the city’s three big weapons factories, and of misappropriating budget funds.

Then the arrests began. One councillor at odds with the mayor was jailed for brawling with police, another was convicted of financing his summer holiday out of city funds. Deputy council leader Valery Kuzin brought the tally up to eight earlier this month when he was arrested for illegal commercial activity.

“Anyone who speaks out against corruption by the authorities, they try to neutralise them, ... put them in prison for nothing,” said Valery Zagursky, a councillor in opposition to the mayor, who recently finished a jail term.

Stubbing out a cigarette, prosecutor Klokov stands by the charges against the councillors.

“Anyone who knows ... the procedures (in the judicial system) where everything down to the last comma is checked, will see there can be no politics, and no fabrication,” he said.

Asked why so many of the councillors were criminals, he said: “Unfortunately, I cannot explain this. We do not choose who we prosecute. ... You should ask the councillors why they committed these crimes.”

Mayor Arsentyev said councillors’ claims of political persecution were a smokescreen.

Some of the councillors had been blackmailing him into giving them cash or municipal property by inventing corruption allegations against him, he said, and now they had been caught.

“What political motives can there be here?” he said in his office one floor up from the city council. “Don’t break the law and there will be no problems.”

But the people of Kovrov no longer believe that argument, said 59-year-old councillor Zagursky.

The proprietor of Tabatskova’ s newspaper, he spent 20 months in prison for bribery and on his release was elected to the council by a landslide.

“When they started having trial after trial after trial it became ridiculous,” said Zagursky. “Can all the councillors really be criminals? Is this a town of crooks?”