Komsomolskaya Pravda journalist criminally charged in Belarus

Henadz Mazhey­ka was detained on the night of Octo­ber 2. Accord­ing to the jour­nal­ist’s moth­er, on Octo­ber 1, KGB offi­cers searched her son’s apart­ment for two and a half hours. The sanc­tion referred to Arti­cles 130 and 369 of the Crim­i­nal Code (incit­ing racial, nation­al, reli­gious, or oth­er social hatred or dis­cord and insult­ing a gov­ern­ment offi­cial).

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 Sep­tem­ber 29, after the pub­li­ca­tion of an arti­cle about Andrei Zeltser, the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion of Belarus blocked access to the web­site kp.by. Accord­ing to the agen­cy’s com­ment, the deci­sion was made since the pub­li­ca­tion pub­lished infor­ma­tion «that con­tributes to the for­ma­tion of sources of threats to nation­al secu­ri­ty.»

«After ana­lyz­ing last-year and espe­cial­ly last-week devel­op­ments, Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da has decid­ed to close its rep­re­sen­ta­tive office in Min­sk. All employ­ees will be paid mon­e­tary com­pen­sa­tion or offered work at oth­er KP enter­pris­es,» the offi­cial state­ment of the Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da edi­to­r­i­al board said.

Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da in Belarus was reg­is­tered on Octo­ber 6, 1994.