Belarus officials on Thursday arrested more than 200 dissidents who had made critical remarks about the government.
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The detainees are being investigated for negative comments on social networks following a raid by the Belarus State Security Committee (KGB), Interior Minister Ivan Kubrakov said in Brest.
“They wrote all sorts of confusion on the Telegram channels in the hope that no one would find them under those nicknames,” the minister said. He claimed that the comments called for protests.
The committee of inquiry said on Wednesday that the authorities had detained 136 people who had left “cynical comments” on the internet about a KGB raid in which an IT officer and a KGB officer were killed. Detainees have been charged with criminal harassment and incitement to social hatred, which generally carries a term of imprisonment of up to 15 years.
On September 28, KGB employees in Minsk, “taking special measures”, broke into the apartment of 31-year-old programmer Andrejs Zelcers. Zelcers opened fire by shooting one of the security guards and killing himself in the shooting.
The leader of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko has promised that Belarus will not forget the new KGB officer who died in the shooting.
An adviser to Belarusian opposition leader Svyatlan Cihanouska revealed that Zelcers had worked for one of Belarus’s largest information technology firms, EPAM Systems.
On September 29, the Belarusian authorities blocked the website of the newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda”, which published an interview with a member of the Zeltser class. Following the interview, its author, Gennady Mozeiko, was detained in Moscow and taken to Minsk, where he is believed to be currently in detention. He has been charged with insulting an official and inciting social hatred. Following the incident, Komsomolskaya Pravda announced that it was suspending operations in Belarus.
The human rights organization Vyasna recognized 73 of the detainees as political prisoners. The total number of people imprisoned in Belarus for political reasons now exceeds 800.
The Belarussian authorities are purposefully eradicating the remaining dissidents, Lukashenko’s opponents, human rights activists, NGOs and the independent media.
The West has sanctioned Lukashenko and his allies for falsifying the presidential election results and brutally suppressing post-election protests.
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