‘They Practiced Beating Techniques On Him’: Hrodna Resident Appears In Intensive Care After Being Beaten By Police

Dzianis Lukyanau has already undergone six surgeries.

Dzianis Lukyanau was returning from the festival near Hrodna when the police detained him for being drunk. The family claims that riot police brutally beat him. The resident of Hrodna is currently in the intensive care department with a diagnosis of muscle necrosis and blood poisoning. He has already undergone 6 surgeries and may lose a leg, writes the website of the Belsat TV channel.

On July 20, near the village of Karolina near Hrodna, the SunDay automobile festival was held. Dzianis Lukyanau, 36, rested there with friends, they drank together. When they started to disperse, Dzianis said goodbye to the company and was about to leave home - there his wife with three small children was waiting for him. The festival area was patrolled by several dozen police officers, including riot police. As relatives of Dzianis say, it was they who noticed him in a state of intoxication.

“Then I asked my brother, maybe he quarreled with someone, got into a fight, but he said no, just walked alongside. Suddenly, two special police officers came up to him, took him by the arms and led him to a nearby forest, away from the meadow where people were,” says Dzianis’s cousin Darya Salianik. She is a Hrodna woman, but lives in Norway and periodically visits her relatives in Belarus. This time she stayed for a long time, as a disaster happened in the family.

“In the forest, the special policemen immediately began to beat him. As he later told me, they practiced beating techniques on him. They beat him with rubber hose in the buttocks, hips and legs. Then they took him by the arms, dragged to the district police officer’s car and drove to the police department to draw up the protocol. Dzianis was taken from the police department to a sobering station, where he spent the night, and returned home in the morning,” says Darya.

According to her, on the third day after the incident, Dzianis could not go to work (he works as a mechanic in the garage), as he felt bad, his leg was in a horrible state. Then he took a day off and basically lay down, but his condition worsened daily - a week later the man was already limping. He did not confess to his wife or mother the reasons for such a bad health condition, as “he was embarrassed to say that the cops beaten him.”

Dzianis’s wife didn’t have time for a long conversation, but she confirmed that everything was just like that: “Perhaps he didn’t admit, because he was afraid that I would quarrel or didn’t want to make it public, we are still a family with many children.”

“At the same time, at first there were no obvious signs of beating, since they beat him with rubber hoses, keeping in mind the purpose not to leave any traces. Dzianis at first thought that the pain will eventually go away, and endured it. When it became completely unbearable, the temperature rose, they called an ambulance, but they did not want to take him to the hospital with such symptoms. When the ambulance arrived again on August 9, a black hematoma with pus appeared on his buttock,” says Darya.

The diagnosis at the moment of hospitalization was necrosis of the muscles. This is a pathological process when soft tissues die in a living organism. Most often, necrosis occurs as a result of external or internal damage to the body. Darya says that over the past weeks Dzianis underwent 6 surgical interventions: they repeatedly cut his leg and tried to clean away the dead tissues, but the infection got into the blood and lymph.

“Now he no longer has half the buttocks and the entire leg has openings from the excised muscles. He is conscious, but the temperature is very high. He was transferred all the time from traumatology to intensive care, but the day before yesterday they decided to leave him in the intensive care, the state as a whole was assessed as stable and serious.”

The problem is that Dzianis does not know the names of those who beat him, they did not introduce themselves. Therefore, in a written complaint, the relatives described the whole situation according to Dzianis and described the consequences of the beating. The complaint was sent to the Hrodna Prosecutor’s Office, the Investigatory Committee and the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ internal security service. The family has not yet received answers from these instances.

They only have a decision on an administrative offense on hand, no more documents. It says that “on July 20 at about 6:00 pm Lukyanau appeared in a public place - at the SunDay festival. He was intoxicated, had an unkempt appearance, unsteady gait, faltering speech, a pungent smell of alcohol from the mouth, which offended human dignity and public morality.” Since he had not previously been brought to administrative responsibility, Dzianis was fined for 0.2 base fees (5 rubles 10 kapeykas) according to Part 1 of Article 17.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses. It follows from the document that he allegedly pleaded guilty.

As for the doctors of the Hrodna ambulance hospital, they know about the beating, but they cannot issue a medical report to the relatives while the patient remains in the intensive care. Darya, who daily contacts with Dzianis’s doctor, says: they can do this only at the request of the Prosecutor’s Office or the Investigatory Committee.

The district policeman who drew up the report on Dzianis and, accordingly, could see him beaten up - Lieutenant Siarhei Karpuk. We found his official mobile number, but they answered that he was on vacation now. Other employees allegedly did not hear about the situation.

Details of the story were also published by the NEXTA blogger.

On August 20, during a meeting dedicated to the quality of work of the law-enforcement agencies, Aliaksandr Lukashenka harshly criticized the security forces using specific vocabulary. Then he declared that “some people in uniform have a cheek and are going out of line”. Even if the head of state did not mean the cases of police violence, in Belarus they are not uncommon.