30 March 2008
Police raid Hrodna office of Warsaw-backed association of Belarusian Poles

Police officers on March 29 raided the Hrodna office of a Warsaw-backed association of Belarusian Poles in an attempt to find what they called illegal printed material.

At about 9 a.m. policemen tried to discover illegal printed material in a car that they stopped near the office. The passengers in the car, which included the association’s leaders Anzelika Borys and Jozef Porzecki, and Ihar Bantser, editor in chief of the Polish-registered Magazyn Polski na uchodzstwie who is a member of the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), refused to open the trunk, reported the BAJ press office.

After the three managed to jump in another car and escape from the scene, the police moved their search into the office, but did not find anything of interest to them in the rooms that were unlocked, Hrodna journalist Andrzej Poczobut, who happened to be in attendance, told BelaPAN.

“There was one locked room, but the police needed a prosecutor’s sanction to break the door,” Mr. Poczobut said. “To all appearances, they failed to obtain the sanction. In addition, some 100 members of our association were in the office and the policemen didn’t dare to act on their own authority.”