Haidukou's case: two months in jail and minimum information

Andrei Haidukou has been behind bars for almost two months, but there is little official information about the case.

Another suspect appeared in the case during the investigation. A trial date is still unknown, Euroradio reports.

Haidukou has been into custody since November 8. There is little official information about him. The only details that are known are the name of the investigator (Barysevich) and the charge (treason). Haidukou was transferred from Vitebsk to Minsk's KGB jail. He then was moved to a detention facility in Vitebsk and suddenly transferred to Minsk in late December. Having spent some days in a detention facility in Valadarski Street, he was transferred to the KGB jail. Reasons for the transfers are unknown.

Valyantin Stefanovich, a human rights activist from Viasna centre, doesn't like the lack of information in Haidukou's case. He hopes the trial will be open.

"We will demand an open trial to give a full estimate of the situation. Taking into account that another person involved in the case (Illya Bahdanau) is not in custody, but restricted to leave the town, I think it wouldn't be dangerous to release Haidukou," the human rights defender says.

No one know when the trial will be held, if it will. Valyantin Stefanovich says the investigation process can take a long time.

Signs of the ongoing investigation are constant transfers of Haidukou to different detention facilities. Another suspect in the case, Illya Bahdanau, appeared in the case during two months of the investigation. He was firstly detained on November 8, but released after a questioning on the same night, after he was taken from Vitebsk to Minsk. Bahdanau doesn't know why he turned into a suspect from a witness. He worries as he talks to a correspondent:

"I don't know. I think the far suspects in the case, the better. I was told that our evidence are different, so I was given the suspect status," he said.

Meantime, the close character of the case stirs up a lot of rumours and versions. The most popular version among Vitebsk opposition activists is that the secret services want to put activists in place. Andrei Haidukou and his friends were to active, especially in the sphere of international contacts, so they were punished. European Belarus civil campaign released a statement saying the activist was detained for distributing Charter newspaper.