Authorities asked to restore access to website of Russian newspaper’s Belarusian edition

In a mes­sage on its web­site, the infor­ma­tion min­istry said that the request had been sub­mit­ted on Octo­ber 5 by BelKP-PRESS, the for­mal own­er of the Belarus edi­tion of Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da.

In the request, BelKP-PRESS report­ed­ly promised to ensure that no news sto­ries vio­lat­ing Belarus’ reg­u­la­tions would be pub­lished on www.kp.by.   

The min­istry said that the request would be con­sid­ered “in accor­dance with the estab­lished pro­ce­dure” and added that it had not received any doc­u­ments regard­ing the announced clo­sure of the Belarus pub­li­ca­tion of Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da.  

Access to www.kp.by was blocked last week in response to an inter­view with a for­mer class­mate of a Min­sk man who was killed dur­ing a Sep­tem­ber 28 raid by Com­mit­tee for State Secu­ri­ty (KGB) offi­cers on his apart­ment.

Andrej 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 web­site hours after the dead­ly raid, a woman who went to school togeth­er with Mr. Zieĺcer described him as a good per­son who “always stood up for truth.”

It tran­spired on Octo­ber 2 that Hien­adź Maže­j­ka, the author of the inter­view, had been arrest­ed and may be charged with incite­ment to hatred and insult­ing an offi­cial under the Crim­i­nal Code.

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.”

The fol­low­ing day, Dmit­ry Peskov, spokesper­son for Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin, said that the Krem­lin regret­ted the clo­sure of the pub­li­ca­tion but believed that it was the right thing to do.