MINSK, 8 September (BelTA) - Lithuania and Latvia's decision not to provide legal assistance to Belarus in the criminal genocide case is unmotivated, Prosecutor General Andrei Shved told the media, BelTA has learned.
“The Lithuanian and Latvian authorities have denied us help, which we see as an unmotivated decision. It is legally unreasonable. They did not question the validity of our request to carry out specific procedural actions as part of the legal assistance treaty. They directly said that they would not perform these actions, because it would allegedly damage their national interests,” said Andrei Shved.
In his words, “these states do not hide the fact that they have covered up living Nazi criminals. They have refused to conduct investigation into the crimes committed by the punitive SS battalions consisting of Lithuanians and Latvians.”
“This once again shows that these states will not take any action to expose Nazi criminals,” Andrei Shved said.
As for the the Nazi criminals, Andrei Shved said that “we will take all possible measures to ensure that they will be held accountable”. “I remind you that they live not only in the Baltic States, but also in more than ten other countries. We have already sent requests there, or are in the middle of preparing such requests. Appropriate documents will be sent to these countries to ensure that all the Nazis, who are still alive, could be brought to justice,” he said.
The criminal case will be investigated until all the circumstances are established, the prosecutor general added. “We are talking about identifying all the places of mass execution of people and examining all the documents. These are thousands, maybe millions of pages of documents. We are working with them at the moment,” he said.
