21 Years Since Abduction of Dzmitry Zavadski

In July 1997 he and ORT reporter Pavel Sheremet were arrest­ed for film­ing a report about the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of the Belarus Lithua­nia state bor­der. Zavad­s­ki cov­ered the sec­ond Chechen war in 1999.

TV cam­era­man Dzmit­ry Zavad­s­ki dis­ap­peared on 7 July 2000 when he was sup­posed to meet Pavel Sheremet at the air­port in Min­sk. He was last seen at the air­port short­ly before Sheremet’s flight arrived from Moscow and his car was lat­er found locked and parked out­side the air­port. Like oppo­si­tion lead­ers Vik­tor Gon­char and Yuriy Zakharenko who had dis­ap­peared a year ear­li­er, Zavad­s­ki received threat­en­ing phone calls for sev­er­al months before his dis­ap­pear­ance. Zavadski’s body was nev­er found, but he was offi­cial­ly declared dead three years after his dis­ap­pear­ance. Four men were con­vict­ed for abduc­tion of Zavad­s­ki, two of them sen­tenced to life in prison, one of them – to 25 years impris­on­ment, one – to 12 years in prison. The alleged mas­ter­minds of this crime were con­sid­ered to be the for­mer head of the nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil, Vik­tor Sheiman, the then-head of the Min­istry of Inter­nal Affairs, Yuri Sivakov, and a for­mer secu­ri­ty offi­cer in the inte­ri­or min­istry, Dmitriy Pavlichenko.

In 2004, the Par­lia­men­tary Assem­bly of the Coun­cil of Europe adopt­ed a res­o­lu­tion stat­ing that the “infor­ma­tion gath­ered by the rap­por­teur leads it to believe that steps were tak­en at the high­est lev­el of the state to active­ly cov­er up the true cir­cum­stances of the dis­ap­pear­ances, and to sus­pect that senior offi­cials of the state may them­selves be involved in these dis­ap­pear­ance.” The Par­lia­men­tary Assem­bly demand­ed that the Belaru­sian gov­ern­ment con­duct an inde­pen­dent inves­ti­ga­tion into the role of then-Gen­er­al Pros­e­cu­tor Sheiman, then­Min­is­ter of Sports Yuri Sivakov and Dmitriy Pavlichenko. The demand for the author­i­ties to dis­close the truth about Zavadsky’s dis­ap­pear­ance has been con­sis­tent­ly includ­ed in res­o­lu­tions of the UN Human Rights Com­mit­tee and the OSCE Par­lia­men­tary Assem­bly.

More ISSUES

Start­ing from Octo­ber 24, 2001 four peo­ple (V.Ihnatovich, M.Malik, A.Huz and S.Savushkin) were on a closed tri­al for the abduc­tion of Dzmit­ry Zavad­sky. The bar­ris­ter who rep­re­sent­ed Zavadsky’s moth­er solicit­ed the judges to hold a pub­lic tri­al ses­sion, but it was reject­ed. All the inquiries of Zavad­sky’s fam­i­ly to receive the tes­ti­monies which had been sent by the bar­ris­ters of Zavad­sky’s fam­i­ly were turned down. On March 14, 2002 four per­sons were sen­tenced to long penal­ty terms for the abduc­tion of Dzmit­ry Zavad­sky (but not for the mur­der, as the body had not been found) among oth­er things, on the basis of the dig­ging tool with blood of Zavad­sky, which had been found in Ihnatovich’s car. Valery Igna­tovich and Max­im Malik were sen­tenced to life impris­on­ment; Ali­ax­ey Huz and Siarhey Savushkin were sen­tenced to 25 and 12 years in prison respec­tive­ly. It was report­ed that the con­victs kept plead­ing not guilty, call­ing the legal tri­al a farce. Accord­ing to the words of one of the bar­ris­ters of Zavad­sky’s fam­i­ly, for­mer Gen­er­al Pros­e­cu­tor Oleh Bozhelko was a wit­ness for pros­e­cu­tion at the tri­al, but he refused to give evi­dence refer­ring to the reg­u­la­tion of Crim­i­nal Pro­ce­dure Code which allowed the inves­ti­ga­tor to defend their sources of infor­ma­tion.

On March 31, 2006 the case was sus­pend­ed again with the com­mon state­ment “because of fail­ure to find the van­ished per­son.

More details:

FATE OF DZMITRY ZAVADSKI STAYS UNKNOWN

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