Roman Bondarenko’s mother: “The Prosecutor General’s Office manipulates public opinion.”
Elena Bondarenko told Naviny.by what it cost her to see her son’s body.
On November 18, the Prosecutor General’s Office published a message about an inspection of the high-profile case of the death of Minsk resident Roman Bondarenko. In particular, the Prosecutor General’s Office stated that Roman’s relatives are evading taking the body for burial.
In the commentary for Naviny.by, Roman’s mother Elena Bondarenko said that the information disseminated on behalf of the Prosecutor General’s Office is a manipulation of public opinion.
According to Elena Bondarenko, when she found out about the death of her son on November 12, she “went back and forth around the city, trying to find out how, when and where she can take the body.” Unidentified persons associated with the department of internal affairs told her on a phone about the need to obtain a document, permission to hand over the body for burial.
On Friday, November 13, Elena arrived at the Minsk City Bureau of Forensic Medicine on Kizhevatova Street to receive a death certificate, since it was impossible to obtain a body for burial without it. She did not have Roman’s passport with her, but as an exception, the certificate was issued in the morning of November 14.
Then Elena Bondarenko had to go to the Central Investigative Committee to get permission to hand over the body for burial. But they told her that since the Prosecutor General’s Office was involved in this case, then she should have asked for this permission there. At the same time, they offered her to arrive by 09:00 on Monday, November 16.
At the appointed time, Elena Bondarenko and her lawyer arrived at the Prosecutor General’s Office, but they were told that “there was no information about who was in charge of this case at that time. They offered to come back by 11:00. They said, by this time they would report the name of the employee, to whom they could address their questions.”
In two and a half hours Elena Bondarenko and her lawyer came back to the Prosecutor General’s Office, but they were not allowed to come in. Elena wrote and registered a request to let her in ASAP. There was a reason indicated in the request, why an urgent appointment was needed. She had to resolve the issue of obtaining permission for her son’s burial. “I want to take my son back and bury him!” she wrote.
But on that day, the employees of the Prosecutor General’s Office did not contact Elena. However, at 3.44 pm, she received a call from the Central District Department of Internal Affairs, and the officer said that she could take Roman Bondarenko’s body from the forensic medical examination department on Dolginovsky tract. When she asked if the permission was ready, they did not answer and just hung up.
The next call was at 4.30 pm. The caller introduced himself as an employee of the morgue on the Dolginovsky tract. He said, “Take the body.”
The morgue was open till 5 pm. And the permission to take the body Elena still didn’t have. She went again to the city forensic medical examination bureau on Kizhevatova street. It turned out that permission to hand over the body from them came in the morning of November 16. And besides that, Elena noted, it turned out that “there was no need for permission to hand over the body to me as a mother.”
The next day, at eight in the morning, Elena Bondarenko was already in the morgue on Dolginovsky tract. Finally saw her son. She brought clothes.
To the Prosecutor General’s Office Elena was invited only by the end of the business day on November 17, the meeting ended after 7 pm.
“The talk was in the evening. I explained that there was no sense to take Roman home yet. We were not ready to hold a funeral and farewell ceremony until his father arrived from Russia. And he needed a coronavirus test results to cross the border. We need time. I told the representative of the prosecutor’s office that I needed to sleep, and in the morning I would continue to deal with all these issues,” said Elena in a comment for Naviny.by.
Roman’s father arrived at night on November 18.
It should be noted that the Prosecutor General’s Office in its message today claims that since Monday morning, on November 16, “the representatives of the Prosecutor General’s Office have repeatedly offered to take their son’s body for burial.”
Roman’s mother refutes this information. “The Prosecutor General’s Office didn’t offer me anything like that,” says Olena Bondarenko. In the morgue on the Dolginovsky tract, she was told that, according to the law, the body can stay there for up to 45 days.
