Lecturer detained at work at BSU journalism department

The law enforce­ment offi­cers came for Kse­nia Mar­tul, a teacher at the BSU jour­nal­ism depart­ment, her stu­dents told.

Short­ly after­wards, police seized con­trol of the Gender_gap chan­nel on Telegram. The pro­file pic­ture was tra­di­tion­al­ly changed to the coat of arms of Belarus.

“Gen­der Gap” is a small and com­plete­ly harm­less Telegram chan­nel about social stereo­types. Noth­ing polit­i­cal was pub­lished there. Unless, of course, you see pol­i­tics in every men­tion of the word “gen­der”.

In a “repen­tant” video, Mar­tul said she par­tic­i­pat­ed in the 2020 mass protests. “I was detained for shar­ing posts from extrem­ist Telegram chan­nels in per­son­al cor­re­spon­dence,” she added.

Ksenia’s hus­band Aleh Mar­tul told mediazona.by that the deputy dean and two men approached his wife and her col­leagues dur­ing class­es. They took Mar­tul “for a talk.” Lat­er Kse­nia called him and said that she was being tak­en to a tem­po­rary deten­tion facil­i­ty and threat­ened with arrest or a fine, the tri­al was set on Wednes­day.

Kse­nia Martul’s hus­band also said that a com­plaint against his wife has been received by the Main Direc­torate for Com­bat­ing Orga­nized Crime and Cor­rup­tion “two weeks ago”. As a result, she wrote a let­ter of res­ig­na­tion yes­ter­day, but was asked to work two more weeks.

On Decem­ber 15, Kse­nia Mar­tul was sen­tenced to 15 days of arrest.