Secret hunt

The Minsk prosecutor's office opened a criminal case against representatives of the opposition Belarusian media: the editor of the Charter 97 website Natalya Radzina, the Novaya Gazeta correspondent in Minsk (and the author of the Daily Journal) Irina Khalip and two employees of the Narodnaya Volya newspaper - editor-in-chief Svetlana Kalinkina and journalist Marina Koktysh.

As Kommersant-Online reports, the fact of the initiation of the case was confirmed by the head of the investigative department of the Minsk prosecutor's office, Sergei Ivanov, but he refused to say under what article the case was initiated. The reason is information allegedly found in computers previously confiscated from journalists. What kind of information is unknown.

The publication recalls that this is the third criminal case brought against opposition Belarusian journalists this year. Previously, they were accused of slandering the former head of the KGB Directorate for the Gomel Region, General Ivan Korzh - it was then that computers were seized, on which some information was now found. The case of slander against Korzh was sent to the archives in the fall and forgotten, but now they remembered about it again and requested it from the Gomel police department to Minsk.