Night search in Mikalai Statkevich's cell

Maryna Adamovich received two letters from her husband after a long pause.

Mikalai Statkevich's wife learnt about new attempts of pressure on the political prisoner, Radio Svaboda reports.

“The lawyer told me on Tuesday that he had been informed about my plans to file several complaints. I said I had planned it, because food had got worse for the last 6 weeks. I tried to solve the problem without scandals. It was slow, but the problem seems to have been resolved. So, I don't plan to file complaints. On the same say, as if to thank me for it, prison officers searched my cell at night for 1.5 hours. It was the first search here. We received stinky boiled sprats, which animal farms perhaps refused to accept, for dinner today. You cannot achieve something in a normal way here,” Mikalai Statkevich writes.

In another letter the political prisoner wrote about foreign minister Makei's words in a recent interview with a Polish newspaper about the people arrested for the post-election protests.

“He said about the people who 'were arrested for an attempt to attack the House of Government' and didn't want apply for a pardon to be released. But only I am jailed for this reason. Other political prisoners are in jail for other reasons. Officials use the plural form when speaking about me. No surprise. Even that man called me the number one enemy of the state,” he writes.

Mikalai Statkevich was a presidential candidate in the 2010 election. He was arrested after a protest rally against the rigged results of the presidential election on December 19, 2010. More than 700 protesters, among them presidential candidates Andrei Sannikov, Uladzimir Niakliaeu, Ales Mikhalevich and their team members, were arrested.

On May 26, 2011, Minsk's Partyzanski district court sentenced him to 6 years in a medium security correctional facility. Confinement conditions for Statkevich were strengthened last year. He was transferred from correctional colony No. 17 in Shklou to prison No. 4 in Mahilou.

One of his latest letters from prison was confiscated by a prosecutor's office. As it became known later, the politician wrote that political prisoners had received rape threats.