Lukashenka's People With Machine Guns "Focused On" Not Only "Thugs"

The same people could be involved in the disappearance of opposition politicians and journalists.

During the speech with a "message to the people and parliament," Lukashenka stated that he had sent his "people with machine guns" to eliminate certain people in the mid-1990s.

"Do you want it to be like at the beginning of my presidential career, when I sent a bunch of people with machine guns to shoot all the thugs on the Berlin-Moscow highway?" – he said.

The former investigator, lawyer and human rights activist Aleh Vouchak commented on the statement to Belsat:

"Lukashenka took the right to extrajudicial killings. As a ruler, he could not give such commands as "shoot" someone. This is a violation of all legal procedures, it's pure banditry dispose of people like in South America. This looks abnormal and criminal for the civilized world. Perhaps, we are talking about the same people who are involved in the abduction of Zakharanka, Hanchar and others. About the same people who beat up presidential candidate Aliaksandr Kazulin in 2006. So "people with machine guns" were focused not only on thugs."

In the early 2000s, after the disappearance of the ex-Interior Minister Yury Zakharanka, the former CEC chairman Viktar Hanchar, the businessman Anatol Krasouski and the cameraman Dzmitry Zavadski, the public became aware of the so-called "death squads" – a group of individuals who eliminated Lukashenka's opponents.

Among others, the former commander of Special Forces Dzmitry Pavlichenka is suspected to be a member of the "squadrons", as well as the current Head of the Department of Affairs of Lukashenka Viktar Sheiman – they still remain under the sanctions of the West and are not allowed to enter the European Union.

At that time, the independent media also received information that "squadrons" could have eliminated known criminals. For example, a criminal boss named Shchavlik.

More information about the "death squads" is in the documentary Gangs.