Criminal Lawsuit Over Zakharenko’s Abduction Suspended :: Charter'97 :: News

Criminal action on Yuri Zakharenko’s disappearance has been terminated just like the similar case of Viktor Gonchar and Anatoly Krasovsky, report the sources in the Minsk procuracy. No clear reasons for such a decision are named though.
Investigator of the Minsk procuracy Vladimir Chumachenko called a halt to the investigation into the former Interior Minister Yuri Zakharenko’s case. The investigator declined to confirm this fact to the “Radio Svaboda” by saying that he has no commentaries for media. However, he shared this news with the Zakharenko’s family lawyer Oleg Volchek. Now both Chumachenko’s rulings are held in the national procuracy. “As far as the investigator’s signature is enough to shut down the case, the procuracy officials will only formally put an end to it. They will check out the lawfulness of his decision and pass their final one,” – “Radio Svaboda” was told by the press-secretary of the country’s procuracy Aleksei Taranov.

However, a well-known human rights defender Garry Pogonailo deems that the national procuracy will simply edit Chumachenko’s decision: “I guess, they will not only check the lawfulness of the decision, but try to minimize the size of the information presented in order to compose a final document, which would contain no new data of interest, which could shed light on the case.”

Garry Pogonailo says that there can be two reasons for the cessation of the criminal action: no abductors have been found and no abducted persons have been located. Meantime, noted Garry Pogonailo, there are plenty of suspects in the case, but the procuracy is unwilling to deal with it. As concerns “the impossibility to locate the missing ones”, Mr.Pogonailo assumes that such an opportunity remains for as long as the suspected persons remain not interrogated.

“Detectives admit that they haven’t done all they should have done. In particular, they never interrogated police general Nikolai Lopatik, nor prosecutor general Viktor Sheiman,” – underscores Garry Pogonailo. And so he believes that the decision to terminate action is absolutely illicit and claims that the plaintiffs will insist on the resumption of the case anyway.