Official charges have been levelled against Brest-based activist Palina Sharenda-Panasyuk, our local correspondent reports. The mother of two minor children has been held in pre-trial detention centre Nr 7 for over four months.
The woman is accused under three articles of the Criminal Code: 368 (‘insulting President’), 369 (‘insulting a government official’) and 364 (‘violence or threat of violence against a police officer’).
“So far, there has been no good news from Palina. Yesterday it became known that she was put in a punishment cell again – she will have to spend there another ten days. Palina has been also placed on the preventive register as a person ‘prone to extremism’. As she refuses to cooperate with the investigator and the prison administration, they keep exerting psychological and physical pressure on her, which I believe to be a direct threat to my wife’s health and life. I want to bring the public’s attention to the fact of prisoners’ being tortured in the pre-trial detention centre Nr 7. Palina has repeatedly reported [such facts], and now she is being avenged for that,” Palina’s husband Andrey Sharenda told Belsat.
On January 3, the police knocked down the door, conducted a search of Sharendas’ place and seized a number of things. At that moment, Andrey was serving a term for participating in a protest rally in November; Palina was detained and taken to the remand prison in handcuffs. A criminal case was initiated against the woman under Art. 364.
In late February, Palina Sharenda-Panasyuk was taken to the so-called Navinki from the local detention facility on February, 23. According to her husband, she was forced to undergo a forensic psychiatric examination at the Republican Scientific and Practical Centre for Mental Health in Navinki residential area in Minsk.
belsat.eu
