BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

06/07/2005

Regime's failure to solve case of missing cameraman condemned on fifth anniversary of disappearance

Reporters Without Borders today deplored the "silence and inaction" of the Belarus authorities in solving the disappearance of Belarusian TV cameraman Dmitri Zavadski and called for foreign experts to be allowed to join the investigation, which resumed on 4 April, a year after the case file was closed.

Zavadski, once President Alexander Lukashenko's personal cameraman, vanished on 7 July 2000 at Minsk airport, where he had gone to meet a colleague. His body was never found. He had resigned from the government TV station in 1996 to join the Russian station ORT and was later briefly imprisoned for his reporting.

The worldwide press freedom organisation, along with the Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ), noted that Christos Pourgourides, the Council of Europe's special rapporteur on missing people in Belarus, had voiced strong suspicions that the regime was involved in the disappearance and trying to cover up what happened. The two groups said Zavadski's family had a right to know exactly what had been done to find him over the past five years.

The case has twice been closed by the authorities, first on 27 February 2003, before being reopened on 10 December that year, officially because of "a need to continue the investigation," and then on 31 March 2004. An official of the public prosecutor's office, Ivan Branchel, announced on 7 April this year it had resumed again three days earlier.

"This latest decision is clearly a bid to head off international criticism of how the case has been handled," Zavadsky's wife Svetlana told Reporters Without Borders. "It was announced not long before the UN Human Rights Commission condemned rights violations in Belarus."

The family has never properly been involved in the case by the authorities or been told how the investigation is going, and still does not know if two members of the interior ministry's special police force given life sentences in 2002 for kidnapping and presumably murdering Zavadski pleaded guilty and said what happened to him and where his body is. The family also does not know if the accomplices named at their trial gave any such information to investigators either.

"I'm now waiting for the investigators to tell me what they're planning to do this time," Zavadski's mother Olga told Reporters Without Borders.

The supreme court sentenced the former head of the interior ministry's special police force, Valery Ignatovich, and one of his subordinates, Maxim Malik, on 16 July 2002 for presumably killing Zavadski and five other people in 2000.

The authorities claimed Ignatovich decided to kill Zavadski because he felt targeted by an interview the journalist gave the daily Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta in 2000 saying he had met Belarusians fighting with independence fighters in Chechnya. The trial did not establish details of the kidnapping or who ordered it.

Pourgourides said in a 27 January 2004 report that three top officials were suspected in the disappearance of Zavadski and three other people and charged that action had been taken at the highest government level to deliberately conceal what happened.

The Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly urged the Belarus government on 28 April to open an independent enquiry into the disappearances and to sack Viktor Sheyman, the prosecutor-general and former head of national security, who it accused of organising them.

The Assembly's resolution (1371) also called for Sheyman and the then interior minister, Yuri Sivakov, and Dmitri Pavlichenko, head of a special police unit, to be placed under legal investigation. It also urged an enquiry into the involvement of several top officials in obstructing justice so as to protect those who planned the crimes.

Source:

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=14334


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