Aleh Alkayew insists that there exists video of execution of Yury Zakharanka
“This video exists and I’ll see it soon,” he said. “Those who made
copies were not simple minded. Last year I was offered to buy a cassette
for $250,000, but I don’t have such money.”
According to Mr.
Alkayew, he stayed in Belarus for two days in mid-November. He entered
and exited the country at night through the Russian border.
In
his book titled The Death Squad, Mr. Alkayew alleges that General
Zakharanka, a former interior minister turned opposition politician who
disappeared in Minsk on May 7, 1999, Viktar Hanchar, an ex-lawmaker and
former chairman of the central election commission, and his friend,
businessman Anatol Krasowski, who disappeared on September 16, 1999,
were murdered by a government-run death squad.
He insists that
the squad killed their victims with a pistol used for executions of
people sentenced to death, and that he was the one who, by order of the
then interior minister, Yury Sivakow, issued the pistol to Dzmitry
Pawlichenka, the commander of an elite anti-terror police unit, shortly
before the disappearances of both Zakharanka and Hanchar and Krasowski.
In
the run-up to Belarus` 2001 presidential election, Uladzimir Hancharyk,
chairman of the Federation of Trade Unions of Belarus who was one of
the candidates, published what appeared to be a handwritten report
addressed by the then criminal police chief, Mikalay Lapatsik, to the
then interior minister, Uladzimir Navumaw. The report, dated November
21, 2000, said that Zakharanka, Hanchar and Krasowski were physically
eliminated by a group led by Dzmitry Pawlichenka by order of Viktar
Sheyman, the then state secretary of the Security Council of Belarus.
Authorities
initially denied the existence of such a report, saying that the
opposition had fabricated the document to discredit the Lukashenka
government, but Minister Navumaw later admitted its authenticity.
In
a videotaped statement sent to the press in June 2001, a member of the
Prosecutor General`s Office`s team that was in charge of the case and a
former prosecutorial investigator insisted that acting on orders from
Mr. Sheyman, Yury Sivakow formed a death squad led by Mr. Pawlichenka to
eliminate political opponents.
Mr. Alkayew’s secret visit came
days before Mr. Sivakow admitted on November 16 that he shared the blame
for the high-profile disappearances in an interview with Belarus’
privately owned sports newspaper Pressbol.
The 66-year-old
Sivakow described the allegation that he is responsible for those
disappearances as the most frequent accusation leveled against him. "Any
reasonable person who has never met with me and knows about Sivakow
only by hearsay probably links this name to the missing politicians," he
said. "Well then. I'm responsible for this, there was, there is and
there will be my guilt in it."
Mr. Alkayew believes that the
statement was a signal to Western politicians who could guarantee Mr.
Sivakow’s safety and a hint that any attempts to assassinate him should
be viewed as an attack on a key witness.
In his report on the
disappearances, made in 2004 by order of the Council of Europe
Parliamentary Assembly, Cypriot MP Christos Pourgourides charged that
officials at the highest level of the Lukashenka government might have
been involved and obstructed attempts to investigate the disappearances.
"As a criminal lawyer, I have no doubt in my mind that these
disappearances were ordered at the highest possible level in the
establishment of Belarus," Mr. Pourgourides told reporters in Strasbourg
in 2004. "I cannot be certain that the order was given by the president
himself, but I`m absolutely certain that the order for their abductions
was given by people very, very close to the president."
“I
sincerely believed that the president knew nothing,” Mr. Alkayew said in
the interview with Deutsche Welle. “During an accidental meeting, I
told everything to Uladzimir Navumaw, who was soon appointed interior
minister. Pawlichenka was arrested and Security Council Secretary Viktar
Sheyman was going to be arrested. But a reverse process started. The
officials who were in charge of the case – the then KGB head [Uladzimir
Matskevich] and the then prosecutor general [Aleh Bazhelka] – were
dismissed [in late November 2000] and I was warned that I should keep my
mouth shut.”
It was Messrs. Matskevich and Bazhelka who
warranted the arrest of Dzmitry Pawlichenka in November 2000. They were
dismissed and Mr. Pawlichenka was released from a KGB jail by order of
Alyaksandr Lukashenka after less than 24 hours.