Political prisoner Andrei Klimau quarantined in Mazyr colony

One of the Belarusian opposition leaders, political prisoner Andrei Klimau was delivered from Minsk to a Mazyr high security colony. The transfer took three days, making the distance of 328 km - 7 hours for a train.

As former political prisoner Valery Levaneuski told Radio Svaboda, “prisoners are transferred in groups to fill in an entire carriage, so they are kept in so called transfer prisons located normally at joint railway stations.”

According to Valery Levaneuski, the transfer prisons are kept inappropriate, mostly due to poor financing. Moreover, the conditions of transfer for prisoners haven’t changed much since Stalin times.

Valery Levaneuski says the transfer of prisoners is “just hideous.” “Inside of the carriages with no windows there are iron cells for 6 people, and they put 12 there,” the leader of Grodna entrepreneurs, former prisoner who was transferred several times during his two-year imprisonment, says.

“Dirt. No light in fact. Prisoners are allowed to the WC once in 7-8 hours - or not allowed at all. Prisoners who suffer from kidney disease have to urinate right in the cells, which makes it stink with ammonia,” Levaneuski says.

Andrei Klimau has already spent 4 years in a general regime colony, then he passed more than two years of his 5-year term, and now he was sentenced to two years of imprisonment in a high security colony. High and medium security differ with a smaller number of dates and parcels allowed. The political prisoner and former deputy suffers from a cardiac chronic disease - stenocardia. It is not known what consequences followed his transfer to Mazyr and how he’s feeling right now. The Mazyr colony administration doesn’t comment on his state of health saying he is quarantined now just like all other “newcomers”.