Famous Graffiti Artist Aleh Larychau Fined $ 345

A Minsk court fined the curator of the street art project Signal for "petty hooliganism."

In the morning of June 6, the Kastychnitski court of Minsk announced the verdict to Aleh Larychau, the curator of the street-art project Signal: a fine of 30 basic units (690 rubles) for "petty hooliganism". A day earlier, Larychau 's girlfriend Hanna Novik, who was detained together with him on June 3, was fined 230 rubles, Svaboda reports.

Aleh Larychau was found guilty under article 17.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses and sentenced to a fine of 30 basic units.

On June 6, 2017, Larychau and Novik were detained by "people in civilian clothes" after they started to splash on the wall an image in support of those arrested in the "patriots' case". Larychau was being surveilled. At the trial on April 5, the police witnesses were not definite about why they had detained Larychau: either for "using obscene language", or because he was painting something.

According to Aleh Larychau, the police department officers did not know at first what to do with the detainees; they thought that they had found the people, who had made the inscriptions on the graffiti Moscow-Minsk. One of the officers asked what the detainees had done, why they should be watched.

According to the well-known graffiti artist, it turned out that the authorities were offended with the collages of Shunevich, Balaba and Miasnikovich, but they couldn’t prove it was his job, since Aleh Larychau has an alibi, and when the first work appeared, he was at the Akrestsin Street jail. However, he was "strongly recommended" to plead guilty, his phone was taken for examination.

We remind that earlier Aleh Larychau served 5 days of arrest for allegedly "threatening the police and using foul language", in addition, Larychau was fined 1,150 rubles for the painting of barbed wire on the graffiti Moscow-Minsk.

Larychau says that there was a "special attitude" to him at the Akrestin jail, he associates this with the fact that the Signal project’s page reported in social networks about the political graffiti and collages in Minsk (it is not known who made them). In early April, Larychau was beaten by two unknown attackers, who have not been found yet.