Zinaida Hanchar Asks Russian Security Services to Investigate Kidnap of Her Husband

Zinaida Hanchar has just filed letters with the request to investigate the kidnap of her husband, vice-speaker of the Supreme Soviet of Belarus of the 13th Convocation Viktar Hanchar to the Russian Federal Security Service and the Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation. In these letters she referred to statements of the highest duty officials of Belarus that Russian secret services were engaged in the kidnap and that from time to time Belarusian state mass media distributed such information. Zinaida Hanchar asks the administration of RFSS to use the convention of legal assistance, signed by Russia and Belarus and conduct the investigation.

In her interview to RFE/RL Zinaida Hanchar said:

-- I have to apply to FSS authorities and the prosecutor’s office of Russia within the limits of the legal assistance convention and ask them to help the investigation. The case hasn’t been considered for five years. More and more often I can hear from Belarusian officials that Russian secret services have relation to the kidnap of my husband. Moreover, in 2001 the state newspaper Sovetskaya Belorussiya published the duty note of Moscow Center of Independent Political Expertise. What center is this? What does it deal with? Why haven’t Belarusian authorities paid any attention to its information? I have no answers. I don’t want to think that Belarusian authorities have relation to the kidnap, because I was born in Russia. I ask to appoint the investigative group that could conduct the investigation. I hope that the authorities will demonstrate a serious attitude to this.

On 16 September 2004 Zinaida Hanchar filed a letter to the president of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin. The presidential administration forwarded the letter to Belarusian prosecutor’s office, which answered that the letter and the report of Christos Pourgourides were attached to the case materials.

We should remind that on 16 September the former vice-speaker Viktar Hanchar and businessman Anatol Krasowski were kidnapped by unknown persons. The investigators found bloodstains in the place of the incident. The court expertise concluded it was Hancha’s blood. Despite the statements of former duty officials that some of Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s subordinates were engaged in the kidnap, the investigation was suspended.