Irina Krasovskaya Files Lawsuit Against Government :: Charter'97 :: News

Wife of one of the missing Belarusian public figures Irina Krasovskaya and lawyer Garry Pogonailo intend to sue the government of Belarus in order to find out the implication of top governmental officials in the abduction of businessman Anatoly Krasovsky and Vice-Speaker of the Supreme Soviet Viktor Gonchar, said at today’s press-conference in Minsk Irina Krasovskaya’s representative, lawyer Garry Pogonailo. “Such procedures are applied in the countries where the government isn’t interested in finding the true perpetrators of these crimes and people, who stand behind them”.

Irina Krasovskaya and her lawyer agreed to undertake such extreme measures not until the procuracy called a halt to the preliminary investigation into the disappearance case of Gonchar and Krasovsky.
- I think nobody believes that the investigation was objective. The main suspect never engaged in the investigation activities – present-day prosecutor general Viktor Sheiman, who cannot be interrogated by an ordinary prosecutor. Nor can he interrogate the president, who has more than once publicly stated that he knows something about the incidents. There has been made an illusion as if there worked some investigation group, though in reality it was only detective Chumachenko. Meantime, ex-Prime Minister Chigir’s case had been run by 24 detectives, which is enough to realize how it all had been done.
Recently Irina Krasovskaya received an official notification on the suspension of investigation into her husband’s case. The document is laid out on seven pages and its content provoked numerous critical statements on behalf of the lawyers and human rights defenders. The latter claim that by so doing our procuracy signed its own powerlessness and dependence on those in the high echelons of power. The first thing, which causes indignation of both lawyers and relatives is that over the past 3,5 years of investigation they never interrogated country’s top officials, whose implication in disappearances had been proven by numerous procuracy and KGB witnesses, as well as the police rapports of Nikolai Lopatik and confinement center director Oleg Alkaev.
Chairman of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee conducted a thorough analysis into the procuracy’s ruling and concluded that it is yet another proof of the fact that the Belarusian special services have been somehow involved in abducting Krasovsky and Gonchar.
- When we traced down what the authorities did and what they didn’t in investigating these cases, we received a strong impression that they want to keep everything under the cloak of secrecy.
Most exciting is the third page of the ruling. It is full of totally contradicting things. For example, it reads that the execution gun was used for some special events, rather than training shootings. Meantime, the top official decline to say to the investigator what exactly is meant by the “special events”. Plaintiffs have every ground to assume that “special events” could well stand for a “political assassination”.
Then it is also mentioned that at the time of Krasovsky and Gonchar’s kidnapping some uniformed men walked around and talked to the tenants, living in close proximity to the place of abduction. The investigators claim that people simply feared to tell the truth. Interestingly, the document doesn’t mention the type of the uniform, worn by those, who questioned the citizens on behalf of police. This issue has been avoided and concealed by the investigators.
All this is enough grounds to confirm that the investigative crew failed to carry out all proper activities and therefore they need to be resumed. Moreover, nobody talked to Matskevich and Bozhelko, both of whom possessed data on disappearances. We assume that one cannot shut the case until these two key witnesses are officially interrogated in the presence of foreign representatives.
Today we have every reason to believe that it’s a political killing. There can well operate in the Belarusian state structures a special criminal gang, which masquerades as if it were some state-run special service, but in reality they pursue criminal goals. There are plenty of arguments in the ruling to prove this point, if one reads it carefully.