Opposition media raided in Belarus: website

(MINSK) - Unidentified men in the ex-Soviet nation of Belarus Tuesday searched the offices of a top news website and the home of a leading opposition journalist, a spokesman for the news portal said.

Oleg Bebenin, a spokesman for charter97.org, the country's top opposition news website, said about ten people had broken into the website's offices in a private apartment in the capital Minsk.

"They have seized and are carrying 10 computers and other equipment out of the apartment," Bebenin said, adding the men were looking for a person no-one at the news portal knew.

He told AFP that the site editor Natalya Radina had been hit in the face when she asked those conducting the searches to show proof of identity.

Meanwhile, a search was carried out at the home of Irina Khalip, a top local journalist who writes for the website as well as Russia's leading opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta and her opposition politician husband Andrei Sannikov.

"She told us that a search had started at their place and their lines were being cut," Bebenin said, attributing the raids to their work as well as Sannikov's intention to challenge President Alexander Lukashenko's grip on power.

"Andrei Sannikov has recently announced that he would run in the presidential polls," he said. The new election is due in early 2011.

Most independent newspapers in Belarus have closed down and there are no independent television or radio stations, making the Internet a key source of information under the country's authoritarian regime.

Lukashenko -- once dubbed Europe's last dictator by the United States -- has ruled the ex-Soviet republic of 10 million people since 1994 but has now made attempts at greater openness.