English

Seventh person arrested over firebomb attack on Russian embassy

A seventh person has been arrested in connection with the August 30 fire-bomb attack on the Russian embassy in Minsk, BelaPAN reports.

According to the news site belarus.indymedia.org, Tatsyana Semyanishchava was apprehended by police in Minsk on September 6. A mobile phone and information storage devices were seized from her apartment during a search.

Ihar Bahachak, Valery Khotsin, Syarhey Slyusar, Mikalay Dzyadok, Alyaksey Zhynhyarowski and Alyaksandr Frantskevich were arrested in a police raid on an apartment in Minsk on September 3.

The six young men were arrested after an anarchist group called Druzya Svobody (Freedom Friends) claimed responsibility for the attack on the Russian embassy, in which a diplomat’s Mazda 3 car was burned after two glass bottles containing a flammable substance were hurled into the embassy's territory at about 10 p.m. on August 30.

In a statement posted on http://belarus.indymedia.org and http://belarus.avtonom.org on September 2, the group said that the attack was in response to the Russian authorities' crackdown on activists protesting plans to build a new Moscow-St. Petersburg highway through a forest north of the Russian capital city.

However, a statement posted on belarus.indymedia.org by people who called themselves "the detainees' friends" on Tuesday said that the young men had nothing to do with the attack.

It said that "anyone can call himself an anarchist today and it's pretty hard to check whether the claim is true as anarchists in Belarus have no clear organizations or networks."

"All this, of course, opens up opportunities for possible manipulation, including on the part of secret services. The possibility of such provocations cannot be ruled out in a tense social and political environment shortly ahead of Belarus' presidential elections," the statement said.