Brest: Customs Officers Search Bus of Belarusian Pilgrims

In the evening of 3 January at the customs office of Brest a bus with Christian you was detained. The border guards searched the bus and personal belongings and took explanations from the pilgrimage participants. They drew a report on Viktar Sianko for owning several copies of the non-state newspaper Nasha niva. The newspapers were confiscated and passed to a prosecutor’s office for expertise of the content. The bus with more than 40 persons was detained on the border for almost 5 hours.

The pilgrims are young Catholic and Evangelic Christians who returned from a pilgrimage to Zagreb where they took part in an ecumenical meeting. One of the pilgrims, Dzianis Sadouski, commented:

‘They looked through everything – sheet music, Bibles, books, copybooks and photos. I consider it as pressurization of active young Christians. It is evidently pre-election time that provokes them to such inadequate actions. There are certain reasons to think they waited for us on the border and everything was planned in advance’.

According to the Christian Human Rights House