Vladimir Lemesh: KGB, get on with your own work!

Four months after the event, an opposition activist has been interrogated concerning arson at the House of Justice, where the trial of Sannikov was taking place.

Just recently I was invited to the Moscow District police department to collect things which had been seized after a search carried out in connection with arson at the House of Justice. Let me remind you, the search was conducted without me, and in the absence of the owners of the flat, after which it was sealed. As it turned out, they then took from me two phones (without sim cards), a camera (without a memory card), stickers and badges of the civil campaign “European Belarus”, a CD with songs of Neklyaev and even bills for tuition at the European Humanities University. It looks like the committee members have expressed a violent fantasy to drag in such “material evidence” to the criminal case, when unknown persons threw a Molotov cocktail at a service door of the court building.

I politely asked if my clothes had helped in uncovering this crime. After a little thought, the investigator replied with a smile: “Of course, since you have been removed from suspicion.” But then he questioned me as a witness! Among other things, he asked me to name the people I know in “European Belarus” and under what nicknames they were registered on social networking sites and forums.

I tried to ask the investigator why an ambush had been arranged to “break the door”, because I could have come under summons, as a law-abiding citizen. But apparently the investigator was himself dissatisfied with the KGB agents who handed him the case to close.

I hope that they will soon return my items, which were seized during yet another criminal case involving the so-called riots on 19 December. Whilst I was spending a day in the detention centre in Okrestina, they searched my place in Soligorsk. Then the guardians of law and order declared to my parents that they were looking for incendiary mixtures and iron bars, but decided to take with them my collection of badges, campaign materials and national and EU flags. They were very disappointed not to find my computer.

Esteemed gentlemen of the KGB, the Interior Ministry and other gallant officers: get on with your own work. Stop tilting at windmills, before you become decisively marginalized, unable to protect civilians from the terrorist plumber.

Vladmir Lemesh, coordinator of the civil campaign “European Belarus”.