MINSK -- A Belarusian journalist who wrote about a deadly raid by officers of the Committee of State Security (KGB) on a Minsk apartment in September 2021 has been sentenced to three years in prison.
On March 23, the Minsk City Court sentenced Henadz Mazheyka, a former correspondent for the Belarusian edition of the Moscow-based Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, after finding him guilty of inciting social hatred and insulting authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka.
Mazheyka was arrested in October after he was extradited from Russia. He was initially charged with inciting social hatred. Investigators said later they had found audio of Mazheyka “insulting Lukashenka” and filed an additional charge against the journalist.
Mazheyka is one of dozens of Belarusians detained across the country on similar charges related to a shooting in Minsk in late September 2021 in which an IT worker and a KGB officer died.
The arrests were connected to comments posted on social media about the incident.
Belarusian authorities blocked Komsomolskaya Pravda's website after Mazheyka's article was published about Andrey Zeltsar, an employee of the U.S.-based EPAM Systems IT company, who was shot dead during the incident.
In the article, a classmate of Zeltsar remembers him as a decent person.
Little is known about the shooting, during which Zeltsar allegedly shot and killed KGB officer Dzmitry Fedasyuk.
Authorities claimed at the time that “an especially dangerous criminal” had opened fire on security officers after they showed up at his apartment looking for “individuals involved in terrorist activities.”
Lukashenka has issued thinly veiled threats to people who post comments on social media praising Zeltsar and criticizing Fedasyuk, saying, "We have all their accounts, and we can see who is who."
Multiple individuals have received prison terms in recent months on charges related to comments about the incident.