Masked People Blocked “Shklovalakno” Plant Entrance Checkpoint :: Charter'97 :: News

On April 4 representatives of some special service carried out a special task. They occupied the main entrance-gate office of the joint stock company Polatsk – Shklovalakno. For about an hour everybody who entered the office were taken a hostage, www.bulletinonline.org informs. People were ordered to stand their faces to the wall, threatened and punched by truncheons. Workers and visitors who understood nothing were made to stand spread-eagled.

Among hostages appeared a worker of a passport office who had recently undergone an operation, a client from Russia and a pregnant worker who had come to the office to be granted a maternity leave. Everybody was rudely told: “Keep silent, stand faces to the wall. Otherwise we’ll use special agents!”

A guard on duty of the enterprise tried to object, but after he was hit by the face against the wall, he stopped talking.

“Are you going to shoot me?” one of the men ventured upon a remark.

“Yes, if we would be ordered,” a masked man answered.

It is not a scenario of a detectivestory. These are real events in the entrance-gate office of the joint stock company Polatsk – Shklovalakno. Investigation is expected. And the details are to be found out. Here are some comments of the victims:

Vasiliy N. had arrived from the Russian city of Vladimir to receive goods:

“When I return home, I am going to tell the press and TV about real situation in Belarus. It’s total lawlessness. I have arrived to buy fiberglass fabric, and I was hit by truncheons and menaced me with a machine-gun. Such things are possible only in Chechnya in our country. I am simply shocked!”

Alyaksandr V., a worker of “Shklovalakno”:

“We were treated like criminals. I pay taxes, and they are financed by that. If nobody would be punished for this lawlessness, I will not trust the sate any more”.

“I was to fire according to my instructions,” told the guard of the enterprise. “But I was been stopped by the fact that they had machine guns, and I had a handgun”.

People were released only after some documents were seized in the Belarusian-Italian joint venture situated next to Shklovalakno. After that the director of the joint venture and his assistant were placed to a jeep and taken to Minsk. The assistant returned on the next day, April 5. As said by him, the director was to return in the evening.

Right after the release almost all victims of these actions filed complaints to all bodies: to the CEO, to the prosecutor general and to the presidential administration.