Iryna Khalip: I didn’t recognize Sannikov

On August 18 Iryna Khalip, a journalist, visited her husband, a presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov, in the penal colony in Navapolatsk.

Iryna Khalip told “Nasha Niva” about her visit.

“I didn’t recognize him. My first thought was that the administration of the colony brought some other man to me. He was smooth-shaven, without beard or moustache, his head clean-shaven. He was the spitting image of Bruce Willis,” Iryna Khailp says. Sannikov told that he had his head shaven and spent some time like this, but he had a beard left. When he noticed that I look like Shamil Basayev, he decided to shave his beard as well. As said by the journalist, she had not seen her husband like this before. Andrei Sannikov had to wave to his wife for him to recognize him.

Their meeting lasted for two hours. The journalist noted that the conditions for meetings in the colony remind the prison in Valadarski Street – a booth, a phone, a glass pane. The only difference, there are more booths here.

The former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Sannikov is employed as a worker producing corrugated board boxes. It is an industry with health hazard, and Andrei has severe cough. But as said by him, everyone coughs there, as the ecological situation is extremely bad there. Soap and polyethene are produced near the place where their brigade works.

Incarceration conditions in the penal colony are rather severe. One can be placed into the punishment cell just for an undone button.

We touched upon thesubject of 9 released political prisoners. As said by Iryna Khalip, Sannikov knows people who had refused to sign repentance papers addressed to Lukashenko, and also those who signed but were left in prison. He did not tell their names not to betray anyone.

We remind that on May 1, 2011 the court of Partyzanski district of Minsk sentenced the presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov to 5 years’ restriction of liberty in a maximum-security colony.

On May 16, 2011 Iryna Khailp was sentenced to 2 years’ imprisonment suspended for 2 years.

You can write to the political prisoner: Andrei Sannikov, 3 Otryad, IK-10, Novopolotsk-5, Vitsebsk region, 211445, Belarus