Unauthorized sanctions in houses of public and political activists continue – police searches mines at Viktar Karnieienka’s

01.08.2005.

According to RFE/RL

In the evening of 30 July a group of workers of Homiel Chyhunachny District Police Board and people in plain clothes burst into the private house in Palieskaia Street 52 in Homiel that belonged to the politician Viktar Karnieienka. The owner was absent. In the yard of the house the member of United Civil Party Aliaksandr Karnieienka and some youngsters discussed youth problems in Belarus.

The police explained their intrusion with information that there was a mine in the house. The sappers and the police found no mines. By the way sappers came there without specially trained dogs. Instead of proposing a save way for evacuation the police with the chair of Homiel Chyhunachny DPB started seizing the present people. Ten of them were taken to a police station for “identification”. Among the detainees there were minors. While some of the policemen interrogated them, those who stayed in the house broke the door of one of the rooms, allegedly searching for mines. Of course they found no explosives and registered it in their report.

What they found was three packages of the book “Occasional president” by Pavel Sheremet and Svetlana Kalinkina, issued in Russia. Regional KGB board paid interest to the books. Its representative, Aliaksandr Ardab’eu refused to give any comments, but when the sappers left the house, the search continued under his supervision. The policemen and Ardab’eu looked through books, newspapers and bulletins that were in the house. They confiscated the book, the bulletins Civil Initiatives, Here and Now, etc.

Alies Karnieienka thusly commented on the reasons for this visit:
-- They were interested not in bomb, but in bulletins and in general, in the house where democratic organizations gathered and held their meetings. It is about the tenth case for the latest months when anonymous calls inform the police that the house was mined or a woman was pulled into it. The reasons differ, but they always come and look for oppositional materials. I also connect it to the fact that some people consider me a coordinator of the Lemon movement. May be, they thought we were preparing to a new action or planned to hand out a new fly-sheet.

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