Harry Pahanyajla: “Belarusian KGB can only carry out political inquiries”

• 17.10.2008, 15:25

Belarusian secret services have started to summon schoolchildren and recent school-leavers, winners of school competitions in chemistry are being for interrogation relating to the issue of involvement in the blast in Minsk on July 4 this year.

Young people are fingerprinted by security officers and saliva tests for DNA. A former judge, the chairman of the legal commission of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee Harry Pahanyajla comments the situation to Deutsche Welle:

“In general, I view organizing of investigation in this case as extremely unprofessional. The fact that they are summoning even schoolchildren simply shows that they cannot work out a plan of investigation professionally, to include measures which would make the investigation more effective, and make the circle of suspects clearer. And here they are acting in hit-and-miss fashion, obviously having no versions of the event; and so they think the more people they interrogate, the more materials they will have about persons found suspicious, and that would allow them to reach the goal and find who had committed the crime. When laymen are responsible for investigation it is even difficult to comment”.

The layer Harry Pahanyajla doubts that the law-enforcing agencies and secret services would manage to find the criminal or criminals. “They won’t be found. We have a very unprofessional field service. They have learnt political inquiry, how to break down party members under interrogation, but to have a wide network of informers, that’s what they cannot do, and they fail in that”.