English

Belarusian embassy condemns Polish documentary about Minsk subway bombing

The Belarusian embassy in Warsaw has condemned a documentary about the April 11, 2011 Minsk subway bombing premiered by Polish TV network TVN on May 8, BelaPAN said.

In a statement posted on its website on Thursday, the embassy described the documentary as a piece of “outrageous manipulation of the facts that has nothing to do with reality.”

It said that it condemned the authors of the film for “taking sides with" Dzmitry Kanavalaw and Uladzislaw Kavalyow whose guilt had been “fully proved” and linking the attack to “some conspiracy theories.” “The film authors deliberately chose to ignore the solid evidence of the terrorists’ guilt at hand, referring instead to people whose knowledge about the case is very dubious,” the embassy said.

It suggested that TVN should also run the Subway film produced by Belarus’ government-owned TV channel ONT “for the sake of the principles of freedom of expression and pluralism.”

TVN should broadcast the film in order to “tell the Polish people all the truth about the tragedy,” the embassy said.

Messrs. Kanavalaw and Kavalyow, two young residents of Vitsyebsk, were sentenced to death over the subway bombing in a trial that was condemned by many observers as hasty and unfair.

As a result of the trial held between September 15 and November 30, 2011, the two men were also convicted of two 2005 bomb explosions in Vitsyebsk, and a bomb attack during an open-air Independence Day concert in Minsk in July 2008. The Supreme Court of Belarus found Mr. Kanavalaw guilty of committing the explosions and Mr. Kavalyow was found guilty of being accomplice to the crimes.

Mr. Kavalyow applied for a presidential pardon in early December, while Mr. Kanavalaw decided against doing so, according to authorities.

On March 14, it became known that Alyaksandr Lukashenka had denied clemency to the men. Three days later, the ONT television network announced that Messrs. Kavalyow and Kanavalaw had been executed.