The city authorities in Brest have denied the local branch of the Belarusian Social Democratic Party "Narodnaya Hramada" (BSDP) permission to stage a Labor Day demonstration on May 1.
Explaining the denial Aleksandr Palyshenkov, first deputy chairman of the Brest City Executive Committee, said that the police were unable to provide security for the BSDP-planned march and rally.
Anatoly Levkovich, leader of the BSDP organization in Brest, dismissed the explanation as "far-fetched," noting that the authorities might have been angered by the appearance of a large number of party flags during last year's official Labor Day festivities.
Mr. Levkovich said that some BSDP activists plan to go to Baranovichi on May 1 to take part in an authorized BSDP rally there. The Brest authorities plan to stage an official rally at 11 a.m., followed by festivities in the Culture and Recreation Park.
Customs officers in Brest recently seized large sums in the euro and the Russian ruble from two Russian citizens who were attempting to smuggle the cash abroad.
According to the State Customs Committee's press office, one of the offenders failed to declare the EUR 15,000 that he was carrying aboard a Moscow-Warsaw train.
The other Russian man attempted to smuggle EUR 9,000 and more than 35,000 rubles aboard a Moscow-Berlin train.
A hole drilled in the Druzhba pipeline near Zhabinka, Brest region, late last week resulted in an oil spill that damaged a hectare of grain crops belonging to a local collective farm named Orepichi.
The Zhabinka district police department was notified of the spill at around 9 p.m. on April 25. The police officers and emergency team sent to the scene found that the spill had been caused by a manually drilled half-inch hole.
Unidentified offenders had dug five feet underneath the pipe to drill. The spill was stopped some 25 hours later when the pressure in the pipeline had been lowered. The Zhabinka district police and the District Prosecutor's Office are conducting an investigation. The amount of the
spill is yet unknown.
Police in Baranovichi, the second largest city in the Brest region, on April 19 arrested a programmer employed with the local branch of the National Bank of Belarus on suspicion that he counterfeited money and
documents.
The police said they had found a notebook computer, three forged student cards, and a color copy of a police officer's ID, a photocopy of a $50 note, 112 phone cards and a phone card recharger at the suspect's apartment.
The police said they identified two workers who had allegedly ordered forged notes. In a separate development, security employees of the local
bar "Grand" turned over to the police a 19-year old customer who paid for his drinks with photocopies of 5,000-rubel and 500-rubel bills. The customer was too drunk to be interrogated about the origin of the forged money.
According to Vladimir Ring, chief of the state-run railroad operator's branch in Brest, the number of trains routed via the city has decreased from twelve to six because Belarus' carriages do not meet European technical standards. The Brest branch purchased no new carriages last year, although 70 percent of its passenger trains are worn out.
The oldest train here is Number 62, whose carriages were built as far back as 1972.
"It costs $460,000 to buy a berth car in Russia. Cars built to meet European standards are twice as expensive. We just don't have such money," complained Mr. Ring.
The branch lost 6.4 billion rubels on passenger transportation in the first quarter, he said. According to him, despite the fact that the branch's suburban network is unprofitable, it intends to continue operating all of its suburban trains this summer.
The summer train from Brest to Simferopol, the capital city of Ukraine's Crimea where vacationers arrive before dispersing along the coast, will operate this summer, too. Those traveling to the Black Sea resorts of Anapa and Yevpatoriya, and the European capitals of Berlin, Prague,
Bratislava and Warsaw will be able to use special sleeping cars separated from the train along the way to proceed to their respective destinations. This makes it possible for passengers to reach their destinations without changing trains.
A regular train service from Brest to Russia's Volgograd via Saratov will be launched this year. The commuter train fare to the Polish border town of Terespol was lowered on February 1, which resulted in more
passengers using the route. In general, however, short-distance travelers increasingly tend to opt for so-called route taxis, relatively cheap and comfortable vans, no matter what Belarusian Railroads
executives may say about fares being low and barely covering the expenses.
Officers of the Committee for State Security (KGB) recently arrested two residents of Brest at the Domachevo checkpoint on Belarus' Polish border for an attempt to smuggle more than half a kilogram of cocaine
from Poland.
According to the press office of the KGB's Brest regional office, the two men, 41 and 26, were carrying the shipment, valued at $100,000, disguised as cream cheese bars, in their car.
Both men are facing between five and ten years in prison. A 35-year-old man from an unspecified country in the CIS has reportedly been detained on suspicion of complicity in this offense, and the KGB is in the process of detecting others that may be involved in the cocaine trafficking chain.
The press office said that the cocaine was intended for sale in Russia. A gram of cocaine, considered a large shipment, sells at some $200 on Moscow's black market. The press office described the operation as "the Brest KGB officers' undisputed success in the fight against the
international drug business."
The Beryoza District Prosecutor's Office, Brest region, on April 17 instituted criminal proceedings against a local government official.
Yevgeny Poznyak, head of the Beryoza District Executive Committee's capital construction department, faces a power abuse charge as a result of an inspection made by the Brest regional office of the interior ministry's Organized Crime and Corruption Prevention Department.
Mr. Poznyak allegedly ordered the building of a power transmission line to connect his weekend house near the village of Krugloye in the Beryoza district to the main power grid. According to investigators, Mr. Poznyak, who then served as first deputy chairman of the District
Executive Committee, never repaid the construction costs, which amounted to almost 1.13 million rubels. The money had been taken out of the district's power line construction budget.
As of Friday, Mr. Poznyak was not arrested and continued to serve in his position, according to an official at the Beryoza District Executive Committee. Earlier this week, the Brest regional government dismissed
Sergei Momotyuk from the post of chairman of the Drogichin District Executive Committee. On March 31, the Brest Regional Prosecutor's Office brought a power abuse charge against him. He allegedly ordered the chairman of a local collective farm to buy a country cottage owned by his son Aleksandr in the village of Detkovichi for 15,087,000
rubels (approx. $7,560). The order was obeyed although the price was almost two times the amount that would normally be paid for a cottage located in a remote rural area. Andrei Senkovets, first deputy chairman of the Committee, currently serves as acting chairman.
Fifteen illegal migrants from Afghanistan were seized Sunday near the village of Borisovo in the Kobrin district, Brest region.
The group was discovered by road police and officers of the Committee for State Security (KGB) in three cars driven by residents of Minsk, while it was attempting to cross the border into Poland illegally, said the Brest regional police department.
The migrants have reportedly been charged with administrative offenses and now face expulsion. The KGB branch in the Brest region has launched an inquiry into the incident.
Several independent young artists in Brest staged a show of solidarity with "the occupied people of Iraq" at the Culture Palace of the microrayon Vulka on April 12.
The event included displays of ceramics by Yevgeny Zhminko, and photographs shot by Andrei Nekrasov during his trip to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
Poet Vladimir Glazov read ten verses about for love, which he called the natural longing for life whereas war is the natural longing for death.
Free Theater artists staged a show entitled "20,000,000" condemning war as evil done for money. The artists decorated the palace for the event. They posted the large sign, "Long Live Freedom and Justice!" on the front of the building, and news reports from Iraq on the walls.
The police in Pinsk, Brest region, on April 9 arrested a woman on suspicion of having left her newborn girl to die.
The newborn's dead body was found by a cleaning woman in a rest room in the AlVeNa insurance company's Pinsk office on Tuesday evening. An AlVeNa employee contacted the police immediately. The baby's mother, a 25-year-old resident of Nobel in Ukraine's Rivne province, was arrested the following day.
As Pinsk police chief Aleksandr Lepinsky told BelaPAN, the young lady had come to the city to stay at her sister's. She gave birth to the baby there and later went to the AlVeNa office to ditch her. Mr. Lepinsky said that the cause of the girl's death was as yet unclear.
However, the girl may have been alive when she was abandoned in the rest room, because the police charged her mother with the knowing abandonment of a person in a condition that presents a threat to his or her health or life.
30 April 2003