Who’s Behind Beatings? :: Charter'97 :: News

Brutally beaten on January 17 academician Radim Goretsky doesn’t doubt that the attack had been masterminded under the analogous scenario as other assaults on representatives of the Belarusian intelligentsia. The attack, says the victim, has been carried out in a similar style as the street beatings of filmmaker Valery Mazynsky, professor Adam Maldis, politician Aleksei Korol and other representatives of the Belarusian national elite. Goretsky’s neighbors noticed a suspicious vehicle with a few persons in it, who stood on watch at his house in the Kulman str. in the evening of January 17 and drove away shortly after the incident. The scholar is now hospitalized with a brain concussion and severe head trauma in the surgery department of the 9th Minsk hospital.

A trauma, delivered to a 74-year old Goretsky belongs to heavy ones, though medics claim that the man is lucky enough to receive less injuries that could be expected. The unidentified attackers hit him on the back of the head. According to his wife, the man lost much blood but still managed to come home on his own. However, he remembered nothing since the moment of attack.

Many circumstances of the beating don’t let rank it as an ordinary act of hooliganism. First, as said by the academician’s wife, the Kulman str. is well-illuminated at nights and many tenants usually return home at 7.30p.m., so street hooligans would hardly dare attack.

Today they many differ in views as concerns the motives of this attack. Some media even recalled family ties of Radim Goretsky with the former KGB agent Uglyanitsa – an author of sensational statements about the disappearances of Viktor Gonchar and Anatoly Krasovsky. Radim Goretsky is his father-in-law. However, the academician himself doesn’t see any point here. He believes that the beating was provoked by the same causes as that of Maldis and Mazynsky.