Journalists detained near KGB building in Minsk

Among the detained there are jour­nal­ist­sAle­na Talk­a­cho­va (TUT.BY), Hali­na Abakunchyk, Kat­siary­na Andreye­va, Anton Sial­it­s­ki, Ihar Ilyash, Anas­ta­sia Kakhanovich, Mak­sim Har­chonak, Tat­siana Kapi­ton­a­va, and TASS pho­tog­ra­ph­er Natalia Fedosen­ka. She report­ed that she was detained along with Reuters reporter Vasil Fedosen­ka. Besides that, the police detained Bela­PAN’s Zakhar Sarokin and Siarhei Sat­suk-Hrabous­ki.

«Our press offi­cer left to Zavod­s­ki police depart­ment, all accred­it­ed jour­nal­ists will be released after ID check» — Vol­ha Chamadana­va, an offi­cial rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Min­istry of Inter­nal Affairs, said.

A few min­utes lat­er TUT.BY’s Ale­na Talk­a­cho­va called the news­room to inform that all the detained jour­nal­ists had been released.

— We were detained by riot police, they took us to Zavod­s­ki police depart­ment in two vans. In the police depart­ment, we were put in charge of Siarhei Varei­ka, deputy chief of pub­lic secu­ri­ty police.  He got a call from a gen­er­al and we could go free after he taled to him and checked our doc­u­ments.

Today at 4 p.m. Babaryka’s team coor­di­na­tor Maria Kalesnika­va was sup­posed to file a peti­tion to the KGB plead­ing to change the mea­sure of restraint for the unreg­is­tered pres­i­den­tial con­tender Vik­tar Babary­ka.

She asked his sup­port­ers to act as bails­men.

— No one can be found guilty with­out an effec­tive court ver­dict. This is the right that is guar­an­teed to us by the Con­sti­tu­tion. It is called the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence. We believe Vik­tar Babary­ka is inno­cent. How­ev­er, the deci­sion to detain him is even more unac­cept­able. We will con­tin­ue to fight against this at every pos­si­ble legal way,» — the head­quar­ters’ state­ment reads.

The peti­tion, which can be down­loaded from Babaryka’s web­site, says that «in view of Babaryka’s per­son­al qual­i­ties, Vik­tar does not pose a phys­i­cal threat or oth­er dan­ger to soci­ety, and his deten­tion is an exces­sive­ly strict mea­sure.» The peti­tion asks for a soft­er mea­sure of restraint for Babary­ka, in par­tic­u­lar,  a release on bail. For vio­la­tion of bail terms, bails­men are sub­ject to mon­e­tary penal­ty in the amount of 100–500 base val­ues (2,700 — 13,500 BYN).