Aliaksandr Atroshchankau Sentenced to 10 Days of Jail

12.10.2007. Tags: political persecution, detentions, arrest, European March.
Source: RFE/RL.

In the evening of 9 October the police allegedly received information about smell of putrefaction from the apartment that was rented by Aliaksandr Atroshchankau. ‘We came there, but found no body. There was already an investigative group working in the flat. Then we drove Atroshchankau to the district police department for identification, and he insulted us with four-letter words,’ testified at the trial a policeman Zmitser Kurylchuk.

His colleague Anatol Sushchenia also spoke about a dead body, but with less conviction: ‘There was a nasty smell in the porch, maybe putrid, but everything was clean in the apartment.’ The policeman did not explain why Atroshchankau was taken to the police department though his wife showed to the police his documents. Instead Sushchenia stated that Atroshchankau ‘behaved boldly and waved his hands’.

Aliaksandr’s wife Dar’ya Korsak said that her husband had not used four-letter words when the police detained him, but embraced her at parting. Half an hour later at the police department the policemen said to her that they were deciding what charges to give to her husband. Dar’ya also said that she was purposefully injured by a policeman: ‘I said that I was his wife and they could look at my passport, but he on purpose squeezed my foot with the iron door.’

Aliaksandr Atroshchankau called the charges absurd. He reminded that the first policeman burst into his apartment on the ground floor through a window and explained it with the implementation of the order to ‘hinder to the European march at any cost’. The police prohibited Atroshchankau’s friends and relatives to pass to him warm clothes and food.