Belarusian interior minister says police, KGB not in conflict

Belarusian Interior Minister Anatol Kulyashow has denied reports of confrontation between the police and the Committee for State Security (KGB).

Allegedly strained relations between the police and the KGB came into the spotlight when four high-ranking police officials were charged and put on trial last year.

Three senior police officials in Homel Region and Viktar Yermakow, chief of the Interior Ministry's main department for fight against corruption and economic crime, were charged with abuse of power. Their trial began at the Supreme Court on 12 October.

Yermakow is accused of giving an illegal order to the other three officials to gather discreditable information about KGB staff. The three officials, for their part, are accused of breaking the law by working to unearth compromising facts about some of the Committee's officers.

While talking to reporters on 28 January, Kulyashow said that he had given testimony in the trial.

"There has never been and should not be such confrontation," the minister said. "The Committee for State Security, owing to its functional powers, has provided counterintelligence support for the Interior Ministry's activity. Let's just imagine for a minute what could have happened if there had not been such support."

Kulyashow denied the speculation that the criminal case had been opened illegally. "Since we live in a law-based state, any criminal case is opened when there are grounds for this," he said. "I have no information proving that this case was opened illegally."

The minister also denied that law enforcement agencies were seeking to arrest Vyachaslaw Dudkin, former acting chief of the Interior Ministry's government corruption unit, who fled the country and later claimed that the case was used to "conceal corruption at the very top".

Days before his arrest last April, one of the police officials charged in the case, Alyaksandr Malayew, recorded a video appeal to Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka.

In the video clip posted on the Internet after his arrest, he said that KGB officers had paid people to offer bribes to police officers of various levels.

Malayew, who headed the Homel regional police department's corruption and economic crime unit, said that KGB staff also resorted to blackmail and threats against people who refused to give false testimony against officers of his unit.

The case made headlines after Lukashenka publicly accused Leanid Minyankow, another officer currently on trial, of building illegal hunting lodges in Zhlobin District that accommodated top law-enforcers and company executives.

"Big police chiefs, heads of major enterprises and top officials of Homel Region hunted so that a probe had to be carried out within the framework of a criminal case," he said.

At a government conference last June, Lukashenka accused Minyankow, then chief of the Zhlobin district police department's Corruption and Economic Crime Unit, of "providing conditions for hunting, fishing and something else".

Lukashenka said that the police official had purchased a two-hectare land plot through a dummy buyer, building 14 structures and buying 29 hunting dogs and three wild boars. According to the Belarusian leader, the place catered to high-ranking officials and company managers, including those representing the Zhlobin-based Belarusian Steel Works.

Source: Belapan news agency, Minsk, in English 1357 gmt 28 Jan 10

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