Editor in chief of Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda describes situation regarding its Belarus version as arbitrariness

“Just a few days ago, we believed that there was some kind of pro­tract­ed mis­un­der­stand­ing, but now I think that every­thing that is hap­pen­ing to Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da is just… Per­haps the best word would be arbi­trari­ness,” Mr. Sun­gorkin said in a radio inter­view on Sat­ur­day. 

“What caused it, I do not under­stand,” he said. “Why to take such harsh, aggres­sive mea­sures against the Belarus ver­sion of Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da, which, in my opin­ion – and not only in my opin­ion, the Belaru­sian author­i­ties have pre­vi­ous­ly admit­ted this – behaves quite tact­ful­ly, quite tact­ful­ly cov­ers every­thing that has been hap­pen­ing in Belarus in the last few months. This is some kind of arbi­trari­ness, this is some kind of inad­e­quate reac­tion to an absolute­ly inno­cent news sto­ry.”

“There are just a few words from a crim­i­nal’s class­mate: that he was a very good guy at school, and that she does not under­stand what hap­pened to him. And these words have left our jour­nal­ist in a deten­tion cen­ter and the web­site of the Belarus ver­sion of Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da blocked,” Mr. Sun­gorkin not­ed.

He claimed that the web­site of the Belarus ver­sion of Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da had been the most pop­u­lar news site in Belarus in the past few months. 

“More than 300,000 peo­ple vis­it­ed it every day,” he said. “Per­haps this annoyed the country’s author­i­ties. Because I was sur­prised and sad to find out that when our web­site was blocked, even state media out­lets in Belarus rejoiced that the pop­u­lar web­site had final­ly been blocked! In gen­er­al, every­thing was com­plete­ly strange to me.”

As anoth­er pos­si­ble rea­son for the arrest and the block, he named “a very ner­vous sit­u­a­tion in Belarus’ polit­i­cal life.”

“They are prepar­ing for a ref­er­en­dum, they are prepar­ing for the adop­tion of a new con­sti­tu­tion and are rather ner­vous about the fact that there is a cer­tain infor­ma­tion chan­nel in Belarus’ infor­ma­tion field, the Belarus ver­sion of Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da, that is not con­trolled by them direct­ly,” Mr. Sun­gorkin said.

On Octo­ber 2, Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da report­ed that its jour­nal­ist Hien­adź Maže­j­ka had been arrest­ed and placed in the deten­tion cen­ter on Akresci­na Street in Min­sk.

Mr. Maže­j­ka is the author of an inter­view with a for­mer class­mate of Andrej Zieĺcer, a Min­sk man who was killed by offi­cers of the Com­mit­tee for State Secu­ri­ty (KGB) dur­ing a raid on his apart­ment on Sep­tem­ber 28.

Mr. Zieĺcer, a 31-year-old IT work­er, is believed to have fatal­ly wound­ed a KGB offi­cer before being shot dead inside his apart­ment.

In the inter­view, which was post­ed on the night of Sep­tem­ber 28, a woman who went to school togeth­er with Mr. Zieĺcer described him as a good per­son who “always stood up for truth.”

On the morn­ing of Sep­tem­ber 29, the web­site of the Belarus ver­sion of Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da stopped being acces­si­ble to users by order of the Belaru­sian infor­ma­tion min­istry.