Committee to Protect Journalists denounces police raids on independent journalists in Belarus

The US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has condemned Tuesday`s wave of police raids targeting independent reporters in Belarus.

Policemen raided the Minsk-based offices of the newspaper Narodnaya Volya and the Charter’97 news site, as well as the apartment of journalist Iryna Khalip and her husband, opposition politician Andrey Sannikaw, seizing computer equipment and electronic storage media. The searches were conducted in connection with a defamation investigation against the journalists who have reported on a high-profile criminal case pitting the police against the Committee for State Security (KGB).