Yahor Pratasenia Who Attempted Suicide In Zhodzina Detention Center Died

Yahor Pratasenia died at 2 p.m. today in his own apartment in Salihorsk. He never recovered from coma.

Three weeks ago his mother Sviatlana Pratasenia took him out of the hospital in Salihorsk and took care of him by herself, but his condition started deteriorating in the last days.

“The doctors told me yesterday that he had little time left. Today he was waiting for me, lying with his eyes open. I came home for a lunch break, he was alive, I cleaned the room, and then it all started, and soon he died on me. I am sitting beside him now, waiting for the police and the doctors to arrive. He never recovered from coma. He was just getting weaker and weaker, and that was it. He only lived for 20 years,” – Sviatlana Pratasenia has told the journalists of Radio Svaboda.

In the end of 2015 the district court of Salihorsk sentenced town dweller Yahor Pratasenia to 14 years of imprisonment for “drug dealing”. Later, Minsk regional court confirmed the sentence, but released Yahor Pratasenia from any responsibility due to the poor health condition of the convict. Yahor Pratasenia had been in coma since the beginning of the year after the failed suicide attempt in the pre-trial detention center in Zhodzina.

Yahor Pratasenia tried to hang himself on the night on January 4-5, but the guards took him out of the noose. The policemen said the convict had spent little time in the loop, but Sviatlana Pratasenia did not believe this and accused the policemen of negligence. The mother referred to the drastic consequences as the son fell into a coma. Yahor Pratasenia in coma initially stayed in the hospital in Zhodzina, then he was transferred to the hospital in Minsk detention center in Valadarski Street, and on March 4 he was delivered to the hospital in Salihorsk.

At a meeting with his mother after the adjudgement of the sentence in December 2015, and in the earlier letters to her from the prison facility, Yahor Pratasenia told about the tortures and the harassment committed by the special investigative agents of the Salihorsk drug control department who, in his opinion, faked his case. The guy warned that he might commit suicide as a protest and to take revenge on the policemen. Sviatlana Pratasenia appealed to the police and the public prosecutor’s office so they would conduct additional checking of the case after these signals from her son.

In January 2016, the Investigatory Committee of Belarus initiated a checking over the fact of an attempted suicide of Yahor Pratasenia in the pre-trial detention center in Zhodzina.

“I received no official action, but I called the Investigatory Committee yesterday and they told me it was nobody’s fault but my son’s. They told me they had just completed the checking and were printing the paper I have not received yet. So, is it nobody’s fault and the investigative agents of the Salihorsk drug control department have nothing to do with this? Why then nobody took my son’s prison letters to me for checking, not just the one letter dated August, but all of them, since the beginning of the year, where he wrote about the harassment and the case falsification? Of course, hawks will not pick out hawks’ eyes,” – Sviatlana Pratasenia has told the journalists.