Image credit: ONT
MINSK, 6 August (BelTA) – Pavel Latushko tried to set on fire the headquarters of the united Belarusian opposition in 2020, BelTA learned from a broadcast on the Belarusian TV channel ONT.
Aleksandr Gusak was in charge of security in the united opposition HQ. He shed some light on events of summer 2020. Not everyone in the opposition was fond of three women acting as the symbol of the protest back then. For instance, Pavel Latushko had his own ambitions. He and Aleksandr Gusak were acquaintances. Footage of their secret meeting outside Minsk at the height of events in 2020 was aired by the TV channel ONT. Pavel Latushko had strongly criticized the work of the presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and her team. “During that meeting [Pavel Latushko] practically suggested setting the headquarters on fire. He said it would be nice to have victims among the leaders. It would invoke a response from the population and the protests would become totally different and radical,” Aleksandr Gusak stressed.
The united opposition headquarters was located in the center of the Belarusian capital back then, not far from the Komarovsky Marketplace. “Tikhanovskaya has forgotten that the Belarus president has saved her from this ritual sacrifice. Staging something like events in Odessa [where a trade union building was set on fire in May 2014] was the idea. Set the headquarters on fire and accuse the authorities,” Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko said on 9 October 2020.
In a conversation Pavel Latushko plainly said that ritual sacrifices were necessary, that a trigger able to literally blow up the society was necessary, with the authorities and the country’s president himself getting blamed for it. “I understand that a bomb is absurd. But a fire is real. They just need too little time to respond. I don’t know… Gasoline can be spilt. Victims are necessary. The more the better. If all of it is organized on 9 [August], it would be totally nice. And we would run with it right away,” Pavel Latushko told Aleksandr Gusak.
Aleksandr Gusak tried to warn Pavel Latushko that they might face criminal prosecution. “In a couple of days Luka [Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko] will be demolished together with all the cops and so on. This is why there will be no criminal cases for sure,” Pavel Latushko was confident.
New people, who started taking an active part in security and safety arrangements, appeared in the united opposition headquarters soon. They said that Aleksandr Gusak’s services were no longer required. Then the man contacted a person he had known well since serving together the early 1990s: Nikolai Karpenkov, who was the chief of the Central Office for Fighting Organized Crime and Corruption at the Internal Affairs Ministry (GUBOPiK). “There were reasons and grounds to believe that Pavel Latushko and the people behind him are ready and capable of seeing their criminal plots to the end. For the sake of one goal alone: to inflate protest attitudes, to have ritual sacrifices for it, and to radicalize possible street protests as much as possible. Well, after this information was briefly checked, it was confirmed and I personally reported it to Gennady Arkadyevich Kazakevich, who was the First Deputy Internal Affairs Minister, Chief of Criminal Police at that time. He took the information very seriously. We took extra steps to clarify it and later on we took the appropriate steps,” Nikolai Karpenkov said.
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