Yevgenia Chirikova, leader of the movement to save the Khimki forest in the Moscow region, said employees of the service had come to her house on Monday night. When she refused to open the door, they spoke to her neighbours.

In an emotional video message posted Tuesday, Chirikova called the employee of the services in Khimki, who said that her visit was due to a letter claiming Chirikova hit and otherwise mistreated her two daughters, four and nine years old.

The employee said the letter was signed by her neighbour, but that the neighbour denied ever having written it.

"In fact, they don't know who authored the letter," Chirikova told AFP, "and now they want to come to my house to do an inspection, which will lead to a conclusion that I am hiding weapons and drugs in my home, hit my children over the head with a hammer and lie on the floor drunk."

The development is the latest in a wave of administrative pressure on activists who are opposing the government's plan to build a highway through the forest in the Moscow suburb Khimki, claiming other routes are preferable.

Khimki's forest landed in the nation's spotlight in mid-2010 after President Dmitry Medvedev halted the road's construction, although it was later given the green light again.

The town is also known for a string of attacks against its environmental activists and journalists covering the project, the most famous of which was the horrific beating of Oleg Kashin of the Kommersant daily.

"They use child protection services, on our tax money, to suppress our activities and to distract me from them," said Chirikova, who herself has been detained and threatened several times.

Earlier this month, another activist of the Khimki movement was detained for six hours on allegations of planting a fake bomb, and police threatened her to take her children away if she did not admit to the act.

After the incident, Chirikova said she was no longer taking her children to school for fear that they would be picked up by child protection.

The tactic was famously used in Russia's neighbour Belarus, where child protection services threatened to take the three-year-old son of jailed former presidential candidate and an oppositional reporter, who were accused of inciting mass riots in post-election Minsk.

Using anonymous tips as a pretext to hinder work of environmental NGOs was also used against Irkutsk-based Baikal Wave, an organisation lobbying to keep clean Russia's famous lake Baikal.

Police raided the group's offices in January last year and confiscated their computers after receiving a hand-written note that it might be using pirated copies of Windows. They returned the group's property only a year later.

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