Alcooliks ;x Posted August 14, 2020 Posted August 14, 2020 Seeing police brutality up close has shocked Belarusians, first during the street clashes with protesters and then as accounts spread of cruelty towards those taken to detention centres. A 25-year-old man died in custody after he was detained on Sunday. His mother said he had been held in a police van for hours. A street very close to my home in Minsk was at the heart of one of the confrontations between police and protesters this week. Stun grenades went off and people screamed as riot police struck them with batons. The screams were so loud that they drowned out the sound of the grenades. Defiance and anger The protests are unprecedented in their scale as people in dozens of cities, towns and even villages rise up and call for the main opposition figure, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, to be recognised as the winner of Sunday's presidential election. I watched as young men and women ran for safety past my windows, taking a break from the clashes before returning to face the police. My female neighbours are trying to stop their sons and husbands from joining the nightly protests, worried for their safety. Some 7,000 people have been detained and you don't have to be protesting to be arrested. My friend's son, a university lecturer, was detained randomly before the elections and spent three days in a cell. The detainee who died in Gomel in southern Belarus, Alexander Vikhor, had been on his way to see his girlfriend, according to his mother.
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