Pikulik sentenced to five days in jail

The academic director of the Belarusian Institute of Strategic Studies sentenced to five days in jail.

A judge of Minsk’s Tsentralny District Court on Friday sentenced Alyaksey Pikulik, the academic director of the Vilnius-based Belarusian Institute of Strategic Studies (BISS), to five days in jail on a charge of using obscene language, reported the BISS press office.

Mr. Pikulik was arrested in the courtyard in front of his house on Nyamiha Street on Thursday evening. He spent the night in the detention center on Akrestsina Street.

The policemen who arrested the man acted as witnesses in court.

They said that Mr. Pikulik was shouting obscenities in the courtyard and, when seeing them approaching him, began to insult them.

Mr. Pikulik denied their statement as untrue. He said that the two officers just came up and ordered him to follow them to a police station.

Testifying in court, Mr. Pikulik`s mother said that at the time of his arrest stated in the charge sheet, Mr. Pikulik was actually still at home.

Mr. Pikulik, a professor at European University in St.Petersburg, has been unable to travel abroad after police took away his passport on April 6.

On that day, road traffic police pulled over Mr. Pikulik’s car in Minsk and ordered him to drive to the city’s Tsentralny district police station for an identification procedure. His passport and iPad were seized as police officers said that the passport may have been forged.

On May 11, Mr. Pikulik visited the police department, where he was told that the passport would be examined for one more month.