General prosecutor’s office considers reports about arms deliveries to Venezuela “misleading information”

On June 17 the leader of the United Civil party Anatol Lyabedzka was summoned to the General Prosecutor’s Office. There he was warned about responsibility for dissemination of knowingly false fabrications in connection with his demand to investigate reliability of reports about deliveries of Belarusian armaments to Venezuela.

As we have informed, on May 19 the politician sent a petition to the Prosecutor General of Belarus Ryhor Vasilevich urging him to probe into report implicating Belarus in weapons deal with Colombian rebels, BelaPAN informs.

“During the conversation with representatives of the office of the Prosecutor General of Belarus I had an impression that the investigator didn’t know what to do with me. First I was asked whether I want to register my letter as a petition or as a report. If it is a report, they are not obliged to response to it, and if it is a petition, then I am warned by them about a responsibility for misleading information under Article 400 of the Criminal Code. I agreed that my letter should be viewed as a petition, and signed a document about my responsibility,” A. Lyabedzka said.

“The Prosecutor’s Office is to check this information, to direct inquiries to Interpol, all the more so as there is an Interpol office in Belarus; to El Pais newspaper, to the TV channel Euronews which has disseminated these reports. If it is true, they are to say where the money from selling these armaments is. And if they are untrue, they are to demand denial of this information,” A. Lyabedzka believes.

In his petition the politician referred to the article in the Spanish daily El Pais on May 10. According to it, a source in the Colombian government maintained that the Venezuelan president intended to supply the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) with arms with the help of Belarus.