On March 10, Minsk /BelTA correspondent/. The public prosecutor demanded that the defendants Ivan Gaponov and Artem Breus be fined. He made this statement during the closing arguments today at a hearing in the Moscow District Court of Minsk in the case of Russian citizens Ivan Gaponov and Artem Breus, participants in the mass riots of December 19, 2010, BelTA reports. The public prosecutor stated that Gaponov and Breus "took an active part in the mass riots." "They acted as part of a rampaging crowd, repeatedly tried to break through to the Government House," he said. However, the prosecutor's representative noted that there are a number of mitigating circumstances: firstly, the damage caused has been fully compensated, and secondly, the young age of the defendants. In this regard, the prosecutor proposed to impose a fine of 500 base units on each defendant (one base unit is equal to Br35 thousand). The trial in the case of Gaponov and Breus began on February 22, 2011. Ivan Gaponov was born in Sochi in 1988, and has been living in Belarus with close relatives since 1995. Before that, he also lived in Latvia. Artem Breus was born in 1983 in Minsk, and then lived in Estonia for a long time. He came to Belarus in the spring of 2010 to obtain a residence permit and find employment. Observers from the OSCE ODIHR, invited by the Belarusian side, Omer Fisher (Italy) and Tamar Khidasheli (Georgia), are present in the courtroom today. -0-

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