Belarusian special services prepared Sheremet’s assassination on Lukashenko’s orders: media publish audio recordings

Back in 2012, the Belarus secret services on the orders of Lukashenko discussed the possibility of blowing up journalist Pavel Sheremet with an explosive which was carried out 4 years later.

This is attested to by the recordings of conversations of the head of the State Security Committee of Belarus in 2008-2012 Vadym Zaitsev, handed over to "Ukrainian Pravda" by the Belarusian opposition "Belarusian People's Tribunal," the Belgian publication EUobserver reports.

Zaitsev's words recorded on a hidden device on April 11, 2012, during the briefing of officers of the elite counter-terrorist unit of the KGB "Alpha" in Zaitsev's office in Minsk are heard on the recording.

In particular, on the recording, they discuss the method of Pavel Sheremet's assassination, who lived and worked in Russia at that time. The task is to blow it up. And make it a public signal.

"We have to work on Sheremet, who's a big headache …

We'll plant ( a bomb – ed.) etc., and this damn rat will be blown to pieces, legs in one direction, hands, in the other. If everything looks like natural reasons, people won't understand the signal…

The president (Lukashenko – ed.) is waiting for these operations," EUobserver quoted Zaitsev.

Investigators also obtained surveillance documents of Pavel Sheremet.

According to the sources of the opposition organization, "Belarusian People's Tribunal," not all the planned goals were declared on the recording. For example, in Russia, Russian expert Andrey Suzdaltsev was also hit.

Katalin Grigoras, an expert at the US National Center for Media Forensics (University of Colorado), who studied the recording in 2020 at the request of EUObserver, said that a digital signature had been removed from the record, which could help identify the source in the KGB, but no record was found. But they didn't identify visible traces of audio manipulation.