Minsk: Police Detain Siarhei Antonchyk

In the morning of 9 March in Minsk persons in plan clothes detained the public activist Siarhei Antonchyk, the deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the 12th Convocation. He was detained on the way to a car parking and taken first to a police station and than to Minsk Maskouski Borough Court.

The lawyer Valiantsin Stefanovich commented: ‘May be, it is a part of the regime’s campaign of preventive detentions of public and political activists, with the aim to isolate them by 19 March. Mr Antonchyk can be charged with violation article 156 of the Code of Administrative Violations (petty hooliganism). They can say he used four-letter words. This practice is widely spread now’.

On 10 March Siarhei Antonchyk was really sentenced to 15 days of jail for ‘petty hooliganism’.