Judge rejects appeal against Komsomolskaya Pravda journalist’s detention

Accord­ing to the Vias­na Human Rights Cen­ter, Mr. Maže­j­ka will stay behind bars until at least Decem­ber 1. 

The jour­nal­ist is being held in the pre­tri­al deten­tion cen­ter in Žodz­i­na, Min­sk region. He has been charged with incit­ing hatred and insult­ing an offi­cial under the Crim­i­nal Code’s Arti­cles 130 and 369, respec­tive­ly.

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 Belaru­sian infor­ma­tion min­istry blocked access to kp.by, the web­site of the Belarus ver­sion of Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da.

The move angered the Krem­lin, which described it as a vio­la­tion of media free­dom. Vladimir Putin’s spokesper­son lat­er said that Mr. Mažejka’s arrest “can­not be approved of” if it was relat­ed to his jour­nal­is­tic work.

On Octo­ber 5, Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da announced that it had decid­ed to close down its Belarus pub­li­ca­tion after “ana­lyz­ing the events of the past year and par­tic­u­lar­ly of the past week.”