Investigation into 1999 disappearance of Yury Zakharanka prolonged once again
Mr. Volchak, who is an official representative of the Zakharanka family,
was notified of the extension by the Investigative Committee of
Belarus.
"It is yet another formal notification that I receive
once every three months,” Mr. Volchak said. “I've got about 40 letters
like that in the last 14 years. Authorities are doing nothing to find
out who murdered Zakharanka. The limitation period for premeditated
murder is 15 years. Investigators are simply waiting for the period to
expire."
Authorities have repeatedly ignored calls to classify
the abduction and murder of Mr. Zakharanka as a "crime against peace and
the safety of humanity," Mr. Volchak said, explaining that there was no
statute of limitations for such offenses.
Police General
Zakharanka, who was 47 when he went missing, was President Alyaksandr
Lukashenka`s interior minister in 1994-95 but joined the opposition camp
after being dismissed for allegedly misusing public funds. He became
known for his effort to found an organization of police and army
officers.
An opposition-formed investigative group led by Mr.
Volchak, a former prosecutorial investigator, insisted that it had five
witnesses to the general being forced into a car by a group of five or
six people in civilian clothes on a street in Minsk on May 7, 1999. The
witnesses described the alleged kidnappers and the car.
The
abduction of Yury Zakharanka ranks with the disappearance of former
Central Election Commission Chairman Viktar Hanchar and his friend,
businessman Anatol Krasowski, in September 1999, and the case of Dzmitry
Zavadski, a Minsk-based cameraman for Russia`s ORT television network,
who went missing in July 2000.
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."
In the
run-up to Belarus` 2001 presidential elections, 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, commander of an elite
police unit, by order of Viktar Sheyman, the then state secretary of the
Security Council.
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, interior
minister at the time, formed a death squad led by Mr. Pawlichenka to
eliminate political opponents.