Editor of Mestnaya Gazeta Andrey Shantarovich Is Interrogated about His Hunger-strike

On 17 November the chief editor of the Mestnaya Gazeta newspaper Andrey Shantarovich was summoned to the police for explanations concerning “unauthorized action” – the hunger-strike of protest against the decision of the Ministry of Information to suspend the edition. The police were interested in the details of the hunger-strike and the fly-sheets with information about it that appeared in Vawkavysk.

On 17 November the new number of the newspaper wasn’t published. According to Shantarovich, Minsk printing house “Plutos” printed 2 500 copies and then stopped the printing because of “debt of the editorial board to the printing house”. Nobody informed Shantarovich in advance. The number concerns his hunger-strike as well as the hunger-strike of one more citizen of Vawkavysk, businessman M. Awtukhovich, the results of the Parliamentary election and the referendum.

According to Belarusian Association of Journalists