A judge of Brest's district court on Tuesday handed down a five-year prison sentence in the region's first ever human trafficking case heard in court.
An unidentified 25-year-old resident of Brest was found guilty of recruiting young women for work abroad as prostitutes. She also will have all her property confiscated. As Judge Inna Klyshpach told BelaPAN, the woman, a janitor by trade, supplied women to Austria,
Germany and Poland in exchange for $200 to $500 for one woman.
All the women were well aware of what kind of work was awaiting them abroad, the judge said. "The court found four counts of human trafficking proved, although police say there were at least 10 counts," Ms. Klyshpach said.
The convicted trafficker was arrested this past June while she was seeing off a recruited woman leaving for Poland.
Police in Brest have detained a commissioned officer serving at a local military unit on suspicion of pandering.
The officer, who offered informal services as a cab driver, was busted during a special operation conducted by the regional police vice and narcotics department earlier this month. He is accused of furnishing clients for prostitutes, a source with the department told BelaPAN.
The officer was released on his own recognizance after being charged under Article 171 of the Criminal Code. A military prosecutor's office was placed in charge of the investigation into the case.
A delegation of the legislature of Russia's Krasnodar province had a meeting with the leadership of the Brest Regional Executive Committee and the Brest Regional Soviet on November 16 during a three-day familiarization visit to the region.
The sides discussed the possibility of signing a cooperation agreement between the two provincial legislatures. The draft agreement proposed by the Russian delegation would envisage information exchange, the organization of joint hearings, the development of cultural and scientific ties and cooperation in the economic, healthcare, education and tourist spheres. The document is expected to be signed during a return visit of Soviet representatives to Krasnodar on December 14 and 15, when the Krasnodar Legislative Assembly is to celebrate its 10th anniversary.
"We can and should cooperate with each other more closely in matters concerning the organization of local self-government, and share the experience of local governmental agencies's work to solve
problems that impede the social and economic development of the provinces and specific enterprises," Aleksandr Shustenkov, deputy chairman of the Krasnodar Legislative Assembly, said at the meeting.
The Russian guests familiarized themselves with the operation of local governmental agencies and local soviets' role in the implementation of the government's social and economic development programs.
While in the Brest region, the Krasnodar delegation is expected to visit the Brest Dairy Plant, the Santa-Bremor fish-processing company, the Belovezhsky agricultural enterprise in the Kamenets district, and the Brest Fortress Memorial to lay flowers at the Eternal Flame there.
The Brest region's trade with the Krasnodar province jumped by 30.1 percent year-on-year in the first nine months of 2004 to $13 million, with Belarusian exports totaling $9 million. The region supplies the Krasnodar province with furniture, gas and electric cookers, and chip wood boards, and purchases mainly turbojet engines.
One man and three children died in a house fire on the morning of November 11 in the village of Radost near Kamenets, Brest region.
The district emergency department received an emergency call from villagers at around 10 a.m., according to the press office of the Belarusian emergency management ministry. A fire brigade, which reportedly arrived eight minutes after the call, saw the house's roofing wrapped in flames. In the burning wooden building, rescuers found the bodies of a 66-year-old man, and his three grandsons aged 3 months, 3 and 5 years. The press office said that the fire might have started when children in the house were playing with a lighter. The parents were away and the grandfather was bedridden. All the four reportedly died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
A cashier with Belarusbank's branch in the village of Molotkovichi, Brest region, has been charged with fraudulently appropriating to his own use some 6.6 million rubels (slightly over $3,000) in individuals' deposits, a source with the regional police department told BelaPAN. The Pinsk District Prosecutor's Office has launched an inquiry into the case under the Criminal Code's Article 211.
The French embassy has delivered some 250 titles of fiction to a mobile library jointly operated by the diplomatic mission and the regional library in Brest.
In addition, the diplomatic office has organized exhibitions of posters promoting the contemporary literature of France and French-speaking countries, Alexander Martinetti, the embassy's attache, told
BelaPAN.
Brest State University and two schools of general education will host exhibitions focusing on the life and creative activity of Victor Hugo and modern French theater. The new books will be available to Brest residents for three months. Some 100 people regularly borrow French titles from the mobile library. A representative of the embassy met with Brest youths on Tuesday to tout education opportunities offered by French schools of higher learning. Six French movies selected by the embassy will play in Brest's theater this week.
A group of unidentified persons vandalized a Holocaust memorial in central Brest late on November 5.
"Unknown vandals set fire to artificial wreaths, scattered natural flowers laid at the memorial, as well as seriously damaged the image of the Star of David," Yakov Basin, vice chairman of the Union of
Belarusian Jewish Associations and Communities (UBJAC), said in an interview with BelaPAN.
The black-marble memorial was unveiled at the intersection between Dzerzhinskogo and Kuibysheva Streets in 1992 in commemoration of some 34,000 Jews slaughtered by Nazis in Brest during World War II. "The monument was erected near a nine-storied residential building built on the site where 5,000 Jews were executed in 1941," according to Mr. Basin. The memorial has been vandalized five times since it was unveiled. "Unidentified vandals painted swastikas and the Stars of David hanging on gallowses, as well as wrote some threats three years ago,"
Mr. Basin noted. It took police very long to find one of the perpetrators. "However, he was not penalized and soon fled Brest," the UBJAC vice chairman said.
A group of illegal migrants from China was reportedly apprehended by border guards near Brest on the night of November 6.
As Dmitry Devyatov, head of the Brest border control unit's press office, told BelaPAN, the illegal migrants, who totaled nine people, attempted to cross the border into Poland near the village of Kotelnya-
Boyarskaya but were seized by an arriving border control squad after the alarm went off. The foreigners were put in a detention center pending a decision on their deportation. Twenty-seven illegal migrant groups totaling some 300 people, mostly nationals of China, Vietnam,
Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, have been deported from the Brest region since the beginning of the year, Mr. Devyatov said.
A judge of the Belarusian Military Court has convicted 24 officers with the Brest-based Zapadny Bug Customhouse in a duty evasion case.
The officers were found guilty of abuse of office and sentenced to various prison terms, with the maximum being seven years, said Yury Azaryonok, spokesman for the Prosecutor General's Office.
The accused also have been barred from serving in administrative positions for five years and will have their property confiscated.
The officers were accused of conspiring with unidentified persons to help the latter avoid paying almost three billion rubels in customs duties for goods brought in from Lithuania between November 2001 and October 2002.
A judge of the Brest Regional Court has handed down a life sentence to a 20-year-old resident of a village in the Pinsk district, finding him guilty of murdering two taxi drivers. Another 20-year-old man has been sentenced to 24.5 years in prison for complicity in one of the murders.
The pair were arrested hours after police discovered a taxi driver's body with 38 stab wounds in his vehicle 200 meters off a major highway outside Pinsk this past March. One of the suspects soon confessed to killing another cabby, who was reported missing since 2003. The victim's body was soon unearthed near the village of Ivanisovska, Pinsk district. An accomplice who helped bury the latter victim has gotten a 1.5-year sentence. Six cab drivers have been killed in Pinsk and the Pinsk district since 1995.
26 November 2004