Novy Chas editors searched and interrogated

The Novy Chas edi­tor-in-chief Aksana Kolb and deputy edi­tor Siarhei Pul­sha cound­n’t be reached from the morn­ing of Octo­ber 20. Wit­ness­es report­ed that Siarhei Pul­sha’s house had been searched. After that, the secu­ri­ty offi­cers brought Siarhei to the Novy Chas edi­to­r­i­al office.

The pub­li­ca­tion’s edi­tor-in-chief Aksana Kolb was also detained. The rea­son for the law-enforce­ment actions is unknown, as the jour­nal­ists have signed a gag order. Aksana Kolb was also released after a search and inter­ro­ga­tion.

Yes­ter­day, Octo­ber 19, the house of Novy Chas pho­tog­ra­ph­er Dzmit­ry Dzmit­ry­jeu was searched, his com­put­er was seized.

Novy Chas is a Belaru­sian gen­er­al polit­i­cal week­ly news­pa­per. It was found­ed by the Min­sk city orga­ni­za­tion of the Frantsisk Skary­na Belaru­sian Lan­guage Soci­ety, and is the suc­ces­sor of the Zho­da news­pa­per. It has been pub­lished since March 2002.

In Novem­ber 2020, pho­to­jour­nal­ists of the news­pa­per were detained while cov­er­ing protests in Belarus. One of them, Yana Trusi­la, was detained twice and sen­tenced to a total of 28 days of admin­is­tra­tive arrest. The pho­tog­ra­ph­er of the pub­li­ca­tion Dzmit­ry Dzmit­ry­jeu was also detained sev­er­al times. On 9 August 2020, he was vio­lent­ly detained while work­ing at a polling sta­tion. Dzmit­ry was then detained sev­er­al times in Octo­ber and sen­tenced to 10 days of admin­is­tra­tive arrest in Novem­ber after anoth­er deten­tion.

On 5 August 2021, ear­ly in the morn­ing, police came to Dmit­ry’s house. The pho­tog­ra­ph­er was tak­en for ques­tion­ing, the tri­al took place the same day. Dzmit­ry­jeu was sen­tenced to 15 days of admin­is­tra­tive arrest for «defi­ance to police.»

On 12 March 2021, the jour­nal­ist of the pub­li­ca­tion Dzya­nis Ivashyn was arrest­ed. Dzya­nis Ivashyn is the author of a series of inves­tiga­tive arti­cles «Who or What Does Berkut Pro­tect in Belarus?»

Ivashyn is charged under Arti­cle 365 of the Crim­i­nal Code (inter­fer­ence in the activ­i­ties of a police offi­cer). The jour­nal­ist was rec­og­nized a polit­i­cal pris­on­er.

On 14 Jan­u­ary 2021, it became known that Bel­druk (state-run pub­li­ca­tions dis­tri­b­u­tion chain) ter­mi­nat­ed the con­tract with the edi­to­r­i­al office to dis­trib­ute the pub­li­ca­tion in its kiosks from Feb­ru­ary 1. From that day on, the news­pa­per was dis­trib­uted only by sub­scrip­tion. On June 7, Belaru­sian Post informed the edi­to­r­i­al office that the news­pa­per was exclud­ed from the sub­scrip­tion cat­a­log for the sec­ond half of the year. The edi­to­r­i­al office sent the news­pa­per to the sub­scribers inde­pen­dent­ly.