15 Years Ago There Was A Terrorist Attack In Minsk Subway

• 11.04.2026, 9:46

Lukashenko's regime could have been behind this crime.

April 11, 2011 at 17:55 at "Kastrychnitskaya" subway station in Minsk there was an explosion of an improvised device.

The official version is that the remote-controlled explosive device was planted under a bench opposite the stopping place of the second and third cars of the trains going towards the station "Ploshchad Lenina. It was filled with destructive elements. As a result of the terrorist attack, 11 people died on the spot, four more died later, and about 200 were injured.

A few hours after the explosion, Alexander Lukashenko arrived at the scene with his son Nikolai, who was six years old at the time.

The next day in the morning, the KGB reported the identification of the alleged perpetrator and put him on the wanted list. Lukashenko later announced that the terrorist attack had been uncovered. The accused were Dmitri Konovalov and Vladislav Kovalev.

On November 30, 2011, the court sentenced them to death.

The investigation of the incident was repeatedly criticized by independent media.

On the fifteenth anniversary of the explosion in Minsk subway, we publish a chapter from the book of the leader of the civil campaign "European Belarus" Andrei Sannikov "Belarusian American or elections under a dictatorship":

- Meanwhile, a serious financial crisis was unfolding behind the walls of the "American". The miracle did not happen. Hundreds of millions of dollars thrown in by the regime for bribing voters, for collective farm PR and strengthening the repressive apparatus led, as we predicted, to the currency fever, devaluation and brought Belarus to the abyss of default. Panic started because of the lack of currency in exchange offices.

At the same time, the cases against us were falling apart. It was obvious that no conspiracy, no coup attempt, not even a scanty espionage case could be glued together. Western sanctions could become a reality, and the Kremlin was in no hurry to help.

And in this catastrophic period for Lukashenko, on April 11, 2011, there was an explosion in the Minsk subway, a terrorist attack.

Prison chief Orlov literally burst into my cell. From the threshold he started yelling, addressing me:

- It's all you and your friends!

- What happened? - I was dumbfounded.

- Turn on the TV, watch the news! The terrorist attack in the subway!

- So you turned off the signal.

- I say turn on and watch, there's blood, victims, wounded, killed. Is that what you wanted?"

The explosion occurred at the Oktyabrskaya metro station, the center of the city, the neighborhood I grew up in. I had the good sense to demand a casualty list as soon as it was available. There could have been people I knew. But my first thought was of Danka, who was very fond of riding public transportation, not alone, of course, with adults.

The next day, when the alleged terrorists were detained, I was taken to Orlov's office, and he began to show me videos allegedly from surveillance cameras. It was difficult to distinguish anything on the screen, but I could still see that the tapes showed different people, not just one "identified" terrorist. Orlov was fussing, praising the work of the KGB and police, returning to the videos again, insisting that I look more closely. I returned to my cell, not knowing what to expect next.

At last they brought the list of the injured. 14 dead and wounded. There were no familiar names, but the list was frightening. People had died.

Very quickly the authorities voiced the alleged motives for the terrorist attack. Two of them were political: destabilization of the situation and actions of youth radical groups. The third version was that the perpetrator was mentally unwell. KGB Chairman Zaitsev even gave away the original State Security plan, saying that the terrorist attack in the subway was revenge for the trials of oppositionists.

I immediately remembered that we, arrested on December 19, were tried for organizing mass riots with the aim of destabilizing the situation in the country. Further - more: on Lukashenko's direct order the interrogations of the remaining opposition activists began. Lukashenko, followed by the ambassadors of Venezuela and Cuba, voiced versions about the involvement of Western countries in the subway attack, and Lukashenko began to hysterically publicly demand expressions of condolences from these countries, although all of them publicly condemned the attack and offered help to the victims.

It became clear that the dictatorship had found a way to divert the population's attention from the catastrophic situation in the country, to disrupt the wave of solidarity with political prisoners and to shift the blame for the collapse of the economy to the West.

The names of the suspects were made public: Dmitri Konovalov and Vlad Kovalev. Everything further resembled a bad play, at the end of which Konovalov and Kovalev were shot. Neither during the investigation nor during the trial was any convincing evidence of the guilt of the two young men of 25 years old found and provided. On the contrary, there were more and more questions and doubts about their involvement in the tragedy in the subway.

The only version that logically explained this heinous crime was the involvement of special services. This version was increasingly voiced on the outside. Some media outlets in the West directly wrote that Lukashenka benefited from the terrorist attack the most.

Arguments in favor of this version were visible inside Amerikanka as well. When I learned the time of the terrorist attack, I remembered that Orlov broke into my cell less than an hour after the explosion. There were and could not be any versions yet, and he was already shouting about a terrorist attack with political purposes.

Orlov told me during another "conversation" that the suspects had already been held in "Amerikanka" for several days.

- They are either not terrorists, or you are more afraid of the political than the terrorists, - I said.

- How is that?

- Well, "masks" with a certain task appeared here especially for us, and "dangerous criminals" are guarded as usual.

The next day I was again taken to Orlov, as I understood, only to see from behind a little girl and a guard in a mask accompanying her at the end of the corridor. Except that the guard led the girl extremely delicately and with his back looked like one of "our" guards.

Later with Zmitr Bondarenko we compared our impressions of the behavior of the guards after the terrorist attack. Orlov also showed him the subway surveillance videos and drew his attention to the fact that Konovalov had been led into the subway by several people. We also remembered the extremely nervous behavior of the guards on the eve of the terrorist attack, they clearly felt out of place. Shunevich even said on the eve of the attack that the "hawks" were not slumbering. In one of the "conversations" with Zmitr Orlov admitted that after the terrorist attack and his "brilliant" investigation Lukashenko's ratings went up.

After the explosion in the subway, they began to hastily prepare trials of the main defendants in the case until December 19. Initially, it was supposed that the investigation and familiarization with the cases would last until mid-May, but we were shortened all the terms, and already in April the trials began.

I am sure that according to the idea of the scriptwriters of our trials and the disclosure of the terrorist attack in the subway, these cases should have overlapped. We were supposed to be connected with terrorists, if not directly, then in terms of a common goal: destabilization of the situation in Belarus.

But our cases fell apart, people did not believe that Konovalov and Kovalev had committed the attack, solidarity with political prisoners did not weaken, and the authorities were forced to abandon the original plan. Now it was important for them to put us behind bars as quickly as possible and get rid of the "terrorists".

At this point, the regime resorted to the tried-and-true method of justifying its actions with the opinion of an international expert. This time it was not OSCE experts, as in the cases of Avtukhovich and Bebenin, but the Secretary General of Interpol Ronald Noble. He rushed to Minsk at the invitation of the security services a month after the explosion in the subway and was not stingy with expressions of delight about the "unprecedented high level of investigation of the crime. Naturally, he knew about the investigation only from the words of the security services.

In fact, Ronald Noble demonstrated an unprecedented level of cynicism, having come in the midst of a political massacre of the opposition in order to support the KGB executioners who led the massacre.

The head of Interpol continued to bend his line further. When Konovalov and Kovalev were hastily and cowardly executed, which caused public outrage and sharp criticism of the actions of the regime and Interpol, he accused the media of bias and once again supported the dictatorial regime.

After the trial of the "terrorists", which was an outright mockery of logic, all physical evidence was destroyed by the authorities. This is only done to cover their tracks.