Belarus Transfers U.S. Lawyer To Psychiatric Hospital
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The U.S. State Department is denouncing Belarus’s KGB for secretly transferring an imprisoned American lawyer to a psychiatric hospital.
Emanuel Zeltser was arrested March 12 by Belarus’s Committee of State Security for allegedly dealing in forged documents. His brother, Alan, said he learned of the transfer to the psychiatric hospital last week from an attorney assigned to Mr. Zeltser by the state. The attorney said yesterday that he would try to have Mr. Zeltser returned to the KGB jail.
“The conditions are much harsher” in the psychiatric hospital, Alan Zeltser said yesterday. Emanuel Zeltser, 54, suffers from diabetes, gout, and other health problems for which he needs medication, but he has no psychological problems, his brother said. Unless treated, “I was told he has three weeks to live,” Alan Zeltser said.
“Despite repeated requests for consular access to Mr. Zeltser, we have been permitted only one visit on March 27,” though he suffers from “serious pre-existing health conditions and requires daily medications,” a State Department spokesman, Tom Casey, said in a statement released Monday.
Belarus, Mr. Casey said, provided no “timely notification” of the arrest, nor did it inform the American Embassy of the prisoner’s “recent transfer to a state psychiatric hospital.” We “urge the government of Belarus to comply with their international legal obligations,” the spokesman said.
The New York Sun reported last week that the arrest is linked to a battle over the multibillion-dollar estate of a Georgian-born businessman, Arkady Patarkatsishvili, a former client of Mr. Zeltser’s.
