Mahiliou: KGB pressurizes Ihar Barysau's family

Three days ago, KGB officers came to the factory “Chyrvony Metalist”, where Ihar's mother works. They asked what her son was doing and where he worked. They also asked the woman when her labor contract expired, and demanded that the director of the factory wrote a characteristic on her.

Valiantsina Barysava says that the visitors behaved politely. They also asked whether she distributed independent press.

In the conversation the KGB employees also asked whether the labor contract was prolonged for Yury Svirski, an initiator of several collective appeals to the local authorities concerning the improvement of courtyards. They were glad to hear that he had become a pensioner and would stop working in a month.

Ihar Barysau believes that such attention of the security services to his family results from his socio-political activism and has increased on the eve of the presidential elections in 2015.

“KGB want to scare my family and create a conflict in it in order to make me give up politics. I am sure it is related to the presidential elections. It show that the surveillance over pro-democracy activists will just increase in connection with the Ukrainian-Russian war,” says the deputy head of the Belarusian Social-Democratic Party (Hramada) Ihar Barysau.

It should be noted that on July 16 Ihar Barysau's car was stopped by traffic police on the highway Minsk-Mahiliou. He was told that his car was wanted for a hooligan action committed in Bialynichy and he needed to come to the Mahiliou District Police Department. At the police department the police examined his car and confiscated 11,800 copies of the newspaper “NASH Mahiliou” and the bulletin “Social Democrat”. On August 12, Judge of the Mahiliou Regional Court sentenced Ihar Barysau to a fine of 4.5 million rubles for “illegal distribution of printed editions”.