Index on Censorship award nomineee Natalia Radzina of Belarus’s Charter 97 has revealed that the KGB tried to recruit her as an informant. She alleges that KGB officers psychologically tortured her whilst she was held at the KGB detention centre in Minsk. She has claimed that she was threatened with “five to eight years” in prison if she did not comply, and told that she would “have no children”.
The police has come down hard on Chinese demonstrators, detaining and putting under arrest hundreds of activists and human rights campaigners. Journalists trying to cover the demonstrations have also been dealt with harshly, and were detained, beaten, and their equipment confiscated. Calls for a Tunisian-style ‘Jasmine Revolution’ to be replicated in China were met with little success.
Dmitry Gubin was dismissed from Vesti FM radio station on Friday, after criticising the St Petersburg Governor, Valentina Matviyenko, on his morning show. The station’s general producer has said that he was fired for his “impermissible on-air style”. The offending remarks included his description of St Petersburg as “the hole of a rural loo instead of the window to Europe” and his provocative “Seig Heil, dear Valentina Ivanovna (Matviyenko)”. Unrepentant, he continued to liken Matviyenko to Hitler.
Opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi and their wives have been arrested and taken to the Heshmatiyeh jail in Tehran, it has been reported. The pair were previously put under house arrest after they called for demonstration, following the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. The Iranian government denies the arrest, maintaining that the terms of house arrest have simply been made more stringent.