English

Femen activist: They did not ask us questions, they threatened to kill us

Three activists of Ukraine`s women`s rights group Femen left Belarus shortly after midnight on December 21 after they said they had been abducted and terrorized by security services following their topless protest in front of the headquarters of the Committee for State Security (KGB) in Minsk on Monday.

The phones of the women went dead several hours after the protest. Their whereabouts were not known until Tuesday afternoon, when they phoned an associate to say that they had been abducted, beaten, humiliated and dumped in a forest near the Ukrainian border, with their phones and passports seized. After spending a few hours in the forest, they finally arrived at a village, Beki, located two kilometers away from the Ukrainian border, where they asked a man to give them his phone to make the call.

Officers of the Yelsk district police department arrived at the man’s house. They first took the women to a hospital for a medical examination and then drove them to the police station.

Doctors said that the women had bruises on their arms and other parts of the bodies.

Outside the hospital in the Yelsk district, one of the activists told journalists: “They did not ask us questions, they threatened to kill us. We were walking around the forest for a few hours, not knowing what to do. We decided to follow a road that got us to a small village. Local people sheltered us and lent us a phone so that we could call our Ukrainian associates. After a while, police arrived. We hope that we are in safety now.” //BelaPAN