Russia’s Komsomolskaya Pravda to send its envoy to Minsk following arrest of its journalist

Accord­ing to Mr. Sun­gorkin, two lawyers will defend Mr. Maže­j­ka.

Ear­li­er, Mr. Sun­gorkin described the sit­u­a­tion regard­ing the Belarus ver­sion of Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da as arbi­trari­ness.

“Just a few days ago, we believed that there was some kind of pro­tract­ed mis­un­der­stand­ing, but now I think that every­thing that is hap­pen­ing to Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da is just… Per­haps the best word would be arbi­trari­ness,” Mr. Sun­gorkin said in a radio inter­view on Sat­ur­day. 

On Octo­ber 2, Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da report­ed that its jour­nal­ist Hien­adź Maže­j­ka had been arrest­ed and placed in the deten­tion cen­ter on Akresci­na Street in Min­sk.

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 web­site of the Belarus ver­sion of Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da stopped being acces­si­ble to users by order of the Belaru­sian infor­ma­tion min­istry.