MINSK, 9 August (BelTA) – Allegations that people were tortured in the pretrial detention facility in Okrestina Street in Minsk in 2020 are fake news. Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko made the statement during a meeting with representatives of the general public, experts, and mass media titled as the Big Conversation with the President on 9 August, BelTA has learned.
Aleksandr Lukashenko said: “Torture in Okrestina Street is a piece of fake news. Lies. Listen, why would anyone torture them? There was no investigation going on over there. Why would people be tortured over there? If someone over there had bruises, they had been beaten when they had tried to attack riot police and internal troops in the streets. And then they were arrested. There was no need to torture them in that building, in Okrestina Street. There was no torture there. You've invented all of it yourselves because you had to.”
Aleksandr Lukashenko stressed: “If Belarus loses the president today, things will go bad. There may be even no Belarus. But you will fail. This is why you should calm down. Feel free to enforce sanctions. We will see where they will lead. We have to calm down, grab our head with our hands, and think about how we can recover from this situation. You will start World War III like that. Are you pushing Belarus and Russia towards it? Do you want to win this war? There will be no winners. And if there are, it won't be you. Let's start negotiations and talk about how we can recover from this situation because we are stuck so much there is no way back. It is my advice to you.”
In turn, one of the reporters said he personally knows people who were beaten in the pretrial detention facility in Okrestina Street. After hearing it Aleksandr Lukashenko confirmed that such things had indeed happened but only those who had violated the law had been beaten. “Since we talk sincerely, I can tell you who got beaten. A lot of former convicts found their way into the pretrial detention facility in Okrestina Street. Including those who had been tried according to 12 articles [of the Criminal Code]. Do you know what relations evolve between convicts and roughly speaking cops? Convicts have a pathological hatred of police officers because they believe police officers should be blamed for everything. They don't care about judges but they hate cops. And when they – drugged-out, smoked-out, and boozed-out people, who had been convicted according to 12 articles – saw their enemies, they went to fight them right away. What did police officers have to do? Those, who went to settle the score with the police officers, got what was coming to them,” Aleksandr Lukashenko said.
A representative of the British TV channel Sky News also asked about last year's events. Aleksandr Lukashenko noted that all the reporters of Western mass media who were present during the meeting were asking one and the same question: about the alleged beatings and torture in Belarus. “The pretrial detention facility in Okrestina Street is no sanatorium. That's it,” the president stressed.
Aleksandr Lukashenko remarked that if reporters talk about torture in Belarusian prisons, they should provide some kind of truthful evidence. “Give me the facts and I will sort them out,” he said. “Instead you say that tortured and beaten people were seen last year. Give me at least one photo. We will find them and ask who beat them and where. Those, who didn't want to be beaten, didn't land in Okrestina Street. Those, who brought knives and shivs to the barricades, possibly got their due. It is possible some people got caught in the crunch by accident. We offered our apologies to them. Maybe we didn't offer apologies to all of them. Once we find them, we will apologize. Only the West doesn't have to worry about it because you can't care less about people, who have been beaten here. You need another hype, another way to ‘bring Lukashenko to the Hague'. But you are a bad tool for it, don't get offended.”
