Political prisoner Mikalai Statkevich gets completely isolated
The prison administration doesn't allow the
prisoner to meet with a priest, he does not receive letters and parcels.
Mikalai Statkevich told about the refusal of the administration to allow the
meeting already a month ago, during the visit of the apostolic nuncio Claudio Gugerotti. The prison administration
another time promised to bring a priest to the political prisoner. However, in
the letter written a month after the meeting with the nuncio, Statkevich says
he still had no meeting with the priest – the prison administration said he was away on a mission.
As Mikalai Statkevich informs, on 25 October the heating in the prison was
finally turned on. At the same time, the cell where the former presidential
candidate is kept has “a stone floor despite the prison regime, and it is not
very comfortable here in winter”.
The politician’s wife Maryna Adamovich
says that her husband is kept in an isolation ward, where, apparently, where
everything is done to create the hardest, lest comfortable conditions with the
aim to break the prisoner.
“It is hard to imagine a concrete cage, where there is no sunlight, you cannot
see the sky and trees, there is concrete even under your feet. And it all has
been lasting 24 for hours a day, everyday for 9 months already. And if we add
what happened in Shklou – then almost a year…” – Maryna Adamovich said to
Belarusian Partisan.
On 12 January 2012 the Shklou District Court sentenced Mikalai Statkevich to a
transfer to a cell-type facility for three years as a “malicious violator of
the regime, who did not show signs of correction”. The same day he was
transferred to prison #4 in Mahiliou.
