Today, it is nine years since the disappearance of Yury Zakharanka, right, a former interior minister turned opposition politician. In April, the Prosecutor General´s Office extended its years-long investigation into the 1999 disappearance by another three months. (08-MAY-08)

Based on www.naviny.by, www.spring96.org
 
“We’ve got a whole pile of identical replies saying that the investigation is under way, and that its results will be reported additionally,” human rights defender Aleh Volchak tells.  “The investigation has not made any progress. All the evidence we have is what we have gathered by ourselves. It was us that found people who eye-witnessed the abduction of General Zakharanka. We dug up evidence that secret services were involved in the abduction, but we don’t know what happened to him afterwards. Although a person missing for more than three years under international standards should be declared dead, they refuse to declare Zakharanka dead. I believe this is very upsetting to his family.”

Abduction
Yury Zakharanka, who was 47 when he went missing, was President Aliaksandr Lukashenka´s interior minister in 1994-95 before he joined the opposition after being dismissed for allegedly misusing public funds. He became known for his efforts to establish an organization of police and army officers. An opposition-formed investigative group led by Aleh Volchak, a former prosecutor, insisted that it had five witnesses to the general being forced into a car by a group of five or six people in civilian clothes on a street in Minsk on 7 May 1999. The witnesses described the alleged kidnappers and the car.

Krasowski.jpgMissing personalities
The abduction of Yury Zakharanka ranks with the disappearance of former Central Election Commission Chairman Viktar Hanchar and his friend, businessman Anatol Krasowski, right, in September 1999, and the case of Dzmitry Zavadski, a Minsk-based cameraman for Russia´s ORT television network, who went missing in July 2000. In his report on the disappearances, made in 2004 by order of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, Cypriot MP Christos Pourgourides wrote that officials at the highest level of the Lukashenka government might have been involved and obstructed attempts to investigate the disappearances.

Whose fault?
In the run-up to Belarus´ 2001 presidential elections, Uladzimir Hancharyk, chairman of the Federation of Trade Unions of Belarus who was one of the candidates, published what appeared to be a handwritten report from the criminal police chief, Mikalay Lapatsik, to Interior Minister Uladzimir Navumaw. The report, dated 21 November 2000, said that Zakharanka, Hanchar and Krasowski were physically eliminated by a group led by Dzmitry Pawlichenka, commander of an elite police unit, by order of Viktar Sheyman, state secretary of the Security Council. Authorities initially denied the existence of such a report, saying that the opposition had fabricated the document to discredit the Lukashenka government, but later Minister Navumaw admitted its authenticity.

Marking mournful date
The Young Democrats marked this mournful date by collecting signatures for the instalment of a memorial plaque to Yury Zakharanka on the wall of the house on the house where he used to live, on 9 Zhukouski Street in Minsk. In January this year, the Young Democrats addressed Minsk authorities with a proposal to name a street in honor of Zakharanka. The answer they received was that the proposal to honour the memory of Yury Zakharanka could be considered only after he was officially declared dead.