English

Ten years since Dzmitry Zavadski’s disappearance

The Belarusian Association of Journalists has called on the public to observe 10 minutes of silence on Wednesday to mark 10 years since the disappearance of journalist Dzmitry Zavadski, BelaPAN reports.

Mr. Zavadski, once Alyaksandr Lukashenka's personal cameraman, disappeared on July 7, 2000 at the Minsk National Airport, where he had arrived to meet Pavel Sharamet, his long-time colleague and friend. His car was found parked near the airport, but the 28-year-old journalist was never seen again. His alleged kidnappers, Valery Ihnatovich and Maksim Malik, ex-members of Belarus' elite Almaz police unit, were sentenced to life in 2002, but they were found guilty of kidnapping, not murdering Dzmitry. The trial failed to establish what happened to him after his abduction. Although his body was never found, a district court in Minsk declared him dead in November 2003.

Dzmitry Zavadski resigned from Belarusian Television in 1996 to join Russia's ORT television network and was later briefly imprisoned for his reporting.

Many say that the journalist was kidnapped and murdered by a government-run death squad.

Mr. Lukashenka has repeatedly denied his involvement and promised that Mr. Zavadski’s disappearance will be solved.

Speaking in an interview with a Russian newspaper last year, the Belarusian leader claimed that Mr. Zavadski had been murdered in an act of revenge by former members of an elite counter-terrorist unit over a report aired by Russian television. According to Mr. Lukashenka, the commandos, who joined Russian military units for the war in Chechnya in the 1990s, were portrayed as militants hired by Chechen separatists in the report authored by journalist Pavel Sharamet. “The cameraman was killed and this provocateur Sharamet lives in Moscow and writes various nasty stuff about Belarus,” Mr. Lukashenka was quoted as saying.