Epress.am News from Armenia
Belarusian police have located three female activists from the Ukrainian women’s rights group FEMEN who say they were abducted and terrorized by security forces after they staged one of their signature topless protests against the regime of President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk.
RFE/RL’s Belarus Service reports that the women, who were found in the Yelsk district of the country’s southeastern Homel region, were taken to a local hospital for medical examinations. They are now said to be at a local police station, RFE/RL reported late on Tuesday.
A correspondent for the Belarusian news agency Belapan reported that doctors observed bruises on the women’s hands and other parts of their body.
The women told journalists at the scene that on the evening after their protest on Dec. 19, they were at a Minsk bus station when six men abducted them and brought them to a forest far from the capital.
They repeated details about their ordeal that FEMEN’s leader, Anna Hutsol, had told RFE/RL earlier in the day from Kyiv.
“They are alive but not in good health. They are very scared,” Hutsol said. “They drove them around in a car all night, then brought them to the woods, poured oil on them, threatened to set them on fire, threatened them with a knife, cut their hair with a knife, videotaped everything, and then left them in the woods.”
Hustol identified the three women as Aleksandra Nemchinova, Oksana Shachko, and Inna Shevchenko and said the KGB seized their documents.
Earlier in the day, Kyiv sent its embassy consul in Minsk to the region to investigate the story. He later met with the activists.
RFE/RL’s Belarus Service spoke to people in Byaki, the village where the women were found. They said the women told them that after being terrorized in the woods, their captors had brought them to the nearby border with Ukraine and ordered them to cross it. The women instead made their way to the village, where a local resident took them in.
A man who gave his name as Yuri told RFE/RL that he had lent the activists his mobile phone so they could reach Hutsol.
The Belarusian authorities have not publicly commented on the women’s allegations.
But earlier on Dec. 20, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oleksandr Dikusarov told RFE/RL that officials in Minsk said no one had detained the activists and the women had left the city voluntarily.
Recall, on Dec.19, the first anniversary of Belarus’s disputed presidential election, the activists gathered in front of the KGB headquarters in Minsk to express solidarity with the demonstrators, politicians, and journalists who were detained in the ensuing protests and government crackdown.
Bare-chested and wearing fake Lukashenko-style mustaches, the women held placards that read, “Freedom to political prisoners” and “Long live Belarus,” a mantra of the protest movement.
One FEMEN member painted a red star on her stomach and partially shaved her head in imitation of Lukashenko’s receding hairline.
Several journalists were arrested while attempting to cover the group’s demonstration.