Belarusian soldier acquitted of assassinating opposition members
Twenty-five years after the murder of three opposition members, Aleksandr Lukashenko’s death squad member Jurij Garauski was brought to trial. ”We received an order and carried it out,” said Garauski, who was acquitted.
The 14 men, known as the ”Death Squad,” were formally tasked with dealing with terrorists, but in reality they killed regular opposition politicians.
On 7 May 1999, Belarus’ former Minister of Internal Affairs, Jurij Zacharanka, disappeared. Four months later, on 16 September, the former chairman of the country’s National Electoral Commission, Viktar Hanchar, and businessman Anatol Krasouski disappeared. All three were part of the opposition in 1999 and had been sought in vain by human rights organizations and relatives for 20 years. Suddenly, in December 2019, Deutsche Welle television channel published an interview with Jurij Garauski, a former Belarusian spetsnaz soldier, who detailed how the three men were murdered.
Last Friday, the now 45-year-old Garauski was acquitted of the murders in a Swiss trial. As a 21-year-old spetsnaz soldier, he was involved in the surveillance of Jurij Zacharanka for a week, as he revealed in a 2019 Deutsche Welle TV interview, before the order to ”arrest and assassinate” Zacharanka came on the evening of 7 May 1999. In the car on the way to the murder scene, the arrested Zacharanka asked for one thing: ”He just said ’make sure it doesn’t hurt’.”
Upon arrival at a military base, Zacharanka was laid face down and Garauski’s boss, Dzmitri Paulitjenka, asked for a gun. Garauski handed Paulitjenka a silenced PB pistol, and the boss shot Zacharanka in the heart twice. The assassination squad drove the body to Northern Cemetery in the capital, Minsk. A coffin was waiting in the crematorium, and the men placed the murdered man in the casket.
On 16 September 1999, it was time again. After the two opposition members, Viktar Hanchar and Anatol Krasouski, were arrested in the middle of the night, they were driven to the assassination squad’s base, where a five-meter-deep grave had already been dug. Once again, Garauski provided the murder weapon to his boss, who executed both men. Afterwards, they were thrown into the grave. Krasouski’s car was also buried: ”It was crushed by a tank and buried,” according to Garauski.
Three days later, the boss of the assassination squad arrived with money: ”He said, ’here, guys, this is for Hanchar and Krasouski.’ And then we each received a thousand dollars,” Garauski said in the TV interview.
Garauski, who fled Belarus in 2018 and sought asylum in Switzerland, also said that he could point out the locations where the three men were buried, adding, ”I feel guilty. If these men had remained alive, the situation would be different in Belarus. As a participant in the murders, I express my sincere condolences to their families and friends. I apologize,” Garauski concluded the TV interview in 2019.
Based on Garauski’s own testimony on television, he was charged and brought to trial in Switzerland in September 2023. During the trial, Garauski changed his testimony on some points, claiming, among other things, that he did not give the boss of the assassination squad the murder weapon and that he did not understand that the intention was to execute the men, ”not until Paulitjenka shot.” ”They made me a murderer in the TV interview. I haven’t murdered anyone, I just participated in the arrests,” Garauski argued before the court, continuing, ”I was a 20-year-old soldier, a small cog performing orders.”
Garauski was completely acquitted in court. The judge explained that it was beyond doubt that the Belarusian state was responsible for what had happened, but Garauski’s role was unclear: ”It is possible that a colleague described the events to him,” explained Judge Olaf Gubmel when the acquittal was announced last Thursday.
The daughter of one of the murdered men, Jelena Zacharanka, was disappointed: ”I am very upset. I believe that Garauski deliberately changed his testimony,” she told the BBC, but added that the trial had at least shown how things are done in Belarus.
The leader of the assassination squad, Dzmitrij Paulitjenka, has long been retired. However, during the protests against the manipulated presidential election results in 2020, Paulitjenka was observed commanding a group of Omon soldiers in Belarus.
Sources: Deutsche Welle and BBC.
