No release for Komsomolskaya Pravda journalist after initial 72-hour detention

Mr. Maže­j­ka remained in the deten­tion cen­ter on Akresci­na Street in Min­sk on Tues­day morn­ing.

Mean­while, Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da has announced that it will focus on assist­ing him.  

“We have hired sev­er­al lawyers to defend our cor­re­spon­den­t’s inno­cence. We sus­pect that this will be long and rou­tine work. We are also pro­vid­ing assis­tance to Hienadź’s par­ents, pri­mar­i­ly mate­r­i­al one,” the newspaper’s edi­tor in chief, Vladimir Sun­gorkin, said on Mon­day.

On Octo­ber 4, the Belaru­sian inte­ri­or min­istry offi­cial­ly con­firmed Mr. Mažejka’s arrest. 

“Giv­en numer­ous inquiries from jour­nal­ists, we say that this cit­i­zen was arrest­ed on Octo­ber 1 by Belaru­sian law enforce­ment agen­cies in the ter­ri­to­ry of our state in the frame­work of a crim­i­nal case opened under Part Three of the Crim­i­nal Code’s Arti­cle 130, which penal­izes incite­ment to racial, eth­nic or reli­gious hatred, and Arti­cle 369, which penal­izes insults direct­ed at an offi­cial,” Ali­ak­siej Biahun, head of the ministry’s Cit­i­zen­ship and Migra­tion Depart­ment, was quot­ed as say­ing.

Ear­li­er in the day, Dmit­ry Peskov, spokesper­son for Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin, said that if Mr. Mažejka’s arrest was relat­ed to his pro­fes­sion­al activ­i­ties, “undoubt­ed­ly, such actions can­not be approved.” 

It was on Octo­ber 2 that Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da report­ed Mr. Mažejka’s arrest. 

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.

Com­ment­ing on the block, Mr. Peskov said that the Krem­lin dis­agreed with it and con­sid­ered it to be a vio­la­tion of the prin­ci­ple of media free­dom.

Ранее:

БАЖ праінфармаваў міжнародныя арганізацыі пра сітуацыю з затрыманым журналістам «КП» в Беларуси»

У Мінск з Масквы тэрмінова выехаў прадстаўнік рэдакцыі «Комсомольской правды»

Союз журналистов России требует немедленно освободить журналиста «КП в Беларуси» Геннадия Можейко ЗАЯВЛЕНИЕ