KGB officers started detaining people on Wednesday under Articles 130 of the Criminal Code (‘inciting hatred’) and 369 (‘insulting a government official). Today the detentions linked to the recent tragic incident in Minsk are still in progress, belsat.eu own sources who asked to remain fully anonymous report.
In accordance with the authorities’ version, Belarusian security officers were conducting a ‘special inspection of the apartments in which people involved in terrorist activities could have been’ on September 28; n the course of Tuesday’s KGB raid, two persons were killed on Yakubouski Street in Minsk – KGB officer Dzmitry Fedasyuk and EPAM employee Andrey Zeltsar. The latter resided in the flat to which plainclothed people broke into on that day. If the Investigative Committee’s statement is anything to go by, Zeltsar fired a shotgun at the visitors and injuted one of them; later, the injured died of wounds in hospital. The owner of the apartment was killed as well; his 40-year-old wife was arrested on suspicion of complicity in the murder of a KGB officer.
Over 50 persons are known to have been held and taken to the detention centre on Akrestsin Street in Minsk. Most likely, they found themselves in the authorities’ crosshairs on the back of leaving comments in defence of the killed IT specialist Andrey Zeltsar on social media.
“They came to me in the morning, I was at my friend’s, so no one was at home. My neighbours say the began to break down the door. When the neighbours asked what for they were doing that, they [officers] started threatening them. One of the security officers mockingly answered that ‘I know and speak too much’. When they found out that I had not been home for a long time, they left,” one of the activists told Belsat.
On September 29, the Belarusian Investigative Committee opened a criminal case against Valery Tsapkala, an emigre politician and might-have-been presidential candidate, under Part 3 of Art. 361 of the Criminal Code (‘calls for actions aimed at harming the national security of the Republic of Belarus’). On the same day, Tsapkala posted a video on the web, in which he defined the murder of a KGB officer as ‘an example of how to fight for all residents of the Republic of Belarus’, which, according to the authorities, is equal to a ‘public call for an armed seizure of state power’.
In addition, the Belarusian Information Ministry blocked the news website of the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in Belarus after it published an article in which an interviewee spoke positively about 31-year-old Zeltsar.
Belsat.eu
