BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

22/06/2009

Belarus soldiers fired upon near Ukraine border

Minsk/Kiev - A patrol of Belarusian soldiers was fired upon by suspected smugglers near the Ukrainian border, the Belapan news agency reported on Monday. The incident took place early Saturday morning near the village of Maloritsky in Belarus' western Brest province, after Belarusian border troops travelling by jeep along a forest road encountered a pair of vehicles blocking their path.

The vehicles' owners responded to a border troop instruction to clear the path with a pair of shots from a shotgun. There were no injuries and the border police jeep left the scene, according to the report.

Belarusian police later in the day arrested six local residents suspected of having been involved in the shooting, said Aleksander Tishchenko, a Belarus border troop spokesman.

The shooting could have been retaliation forthe recent seizure by Belarusian border police of smuggled goods valued at over 126,000, an unprecedented sum for the region, Tishchenko said.

"They (the smugglers) are getting more and more organized and violent," he said. "It is also very possible that they fired to distract (the border patrol) from goods crossing the border somewhere else."

Smuggling between Ukraine and Belarus is a major source of income between the two former Soviet republic's border districts, a swampy and forested region, with one of Europe's poorest economies.

The most commonly-smuggled goods between the two countries according to news reports are Belarusian fuel bought at state-financed low prices and delivered to Ukraine, in exchange for consumer goods, which would be heavily taxed in Belarus if imported into the country legally.

Source:

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/274304,belarus-soldiers-fired-upon-near-ukraine-border.html

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