Assu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist who visited her family in Kazakhstan, has now been arrested, colleagues report.

During her work for US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague on 2 June, she was temporarily detained.

As a result, she was arrested again on Wednesday and charged with failure to register as a foreign agent, which is punishable by up to five years in prison.

This is the second US journalist detained in Russia this year, after Ms Kurmasheva.

Evan Gershkovich, 31, a Wall Street Journal Moscow correspondent, was arrested in March and charged with espionage. A Moscow court rejected an appeal and ordered him to remain in custody earlier this month.

Both his employer and the US government strongly deny the charges, claiming he’s being held as a bargaining chip for Russian citizens held by the US or its allies.

Tatar-Bashkir service of RFE/RL is run by Alsu Kurmasheva, who holds both US and Russian citizenship. Indigenous peoples from two central Russian regions speak Tatar and Bashkir languages closely related to each other.

Ms Kurmasheva, who lives in the Czech Republic, traveled to Kazan in late May for a family emergency. When she arrived at the airport to catch her return flight, she was detained and her Russian and American passports were confiscated.

Tatar Inform, a local state news site, reports that authorities charged her with failing to register as a foreign agent and gathering information on behalf of foreign governments.

Ms Kurmasheva was charged under a law written so broadly that it could prohibit even the collection of basic information about military personnel, such as soldiers’ names and unit numbers.

In her work, Ms Kurmasheva frequently addressed the issues facing ethnic minorities in central Russia.