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KIDNAPPET: Maria Kolesnikova has recovered from the kidnapping and recounts the dramatic days when she was kidnapped Photo: TATYANA ZENKOVICH / EPA
Belarusian opposition politician Maria Kolesnikova says her kidnappers threatened to tear her apart if she did not leave her homeland.
After being missing for two days, opposition politician Maria Kolesnikova has recovered. Now she speaks of the brutal treatment to which she was subjected by the kidnappers in her home country, Belarus.
She had a sack on her head when she was taken to the border with Ukraine, she said in a statement Thursday.
– After the KGB officers realized that I was not going to leave Belarus voluntarily, they put a sack on my head, put me in a minibus and took me to the border between Belarus and Ukraine. There they tried to expel me against my will from Belarus, explains Kolesnikova in the statement she has written with her lawyer, Reuters reports.
CAMPAIGN LEADER: Maria Kolesnikova was the leader of Viktor Babaryko’s presidential campaign and supports opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. Photo: SERGEI GAPON / AFP
Out of the country “in pieces”
It was on Monday that masked men put Kolesnikova into a car and took her from the center of Minsk. They took her to the border with Ukraine, but she escaped deportation from her home country because she soon tore her own passport to pieces.
– These people threatened to take my life. It was said that if I did not leave Belarus voluntarily, they would take me out anyway: alive or in pieces, as quoted. Reuters.
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Lost friends
On Wednesday afternoon, Kolesnikova, who had been missing since Monday, appeared at a Minsk police station. There she was in preventive detention pending the case for which the authorities will prosecute her.
The two Kolesnikova supporters, Anton Rodnenkov and Ivan Kravtsov, who were also taken away in the kidnapping car, were forced to leave Belarus for Ukraine by force, Ukraine’s Deputy Interior Minister Anton Gerashchenko said on Tuesday, Interfax reported.
Maria Kolesnikova could not be deported from Belarus, because this brave woman acted to avoid crossing the border, the deputy interior minister wrote on his Facebook page.
Perpetrators’ names
Now Kolesnikova will sue Belarusian authorities, including KGB intelligence, over the way she was treated, her lawyer Lyudmila Kazak told Reuters.
The opposition politician will name all those who have been involved in the brutal treatment that has been given in recent days.
She also says that threats of imprisonment were made for up to 25 years, and that she would “make sure that I was uncomfortable” in custody, she writes. tut.by, citing the statement of Kolesnikova and her lawyer.
