Another journalist interrogated by KGB

07.04.2008. Tags: criminal persecution, journalists, KGB.
Source: Belarusian Association of Journalists.

4 April the investigator of the Homel oblast KGB office Andrei Kolasau interrogated the journalist Dzmitry Karpenka as a witness in case #05011110396, brought in 2005 on the fact of defaming the head of the state.

‘The interrogation was conducted in presence of the lawyer Piatro Barysau. I cannot say anything about the essence of the talk as I had to sign for nondisclosure of the case materials,’ said Dzmitry Karpenka to the correspondent of the monitoring service of the Belarusian Association of Journalists.

28 March Karpenka’s apartment was searched by KGB, as well as the apartments of many other non-state journalists. Photos, notebooks and music CDs were confiscated from him.

Case #05011110396 was brought by the prosecutor’s office of Minsk in August 2005 on the fact of distributing the cartoons on the internet that ‘defame the honor and dignity of the president of Belarus’ (article 367, part 1). Within the frames of this case the investigation interrogated the coordinator of the Third Way initiative Pavel Marozau and the webmaster of the Third Way’s site Andrei Abozau. The activists’ apartments were searched by the KGB, who confiscated from them computer supplies. Marozau, Abozau and Aleh Minich, the third suspect in the case, emigrated from Belarus.

At the end of March 2008 the similar searches were performed at the apartments of independent journalists.