A former employee of BBB confirmed this number to Mediazona. Another publication, Zerkalo obtained testimony from a source within the BBB team who specified that Gaiko could potentially have had access to messages from more than 8,000 people.
According to Belsat, Gaiko was able to access the data of about 10,000 Belarusians who had contacted the network of BBB channels.
Release regime data trove from belarus tv#
But this autumn, Belsat TV channel conducted its own investigation, confirming that Gaiko did not only pass on security forces data to the BBB, but was one of the administrators of the channel and responsible for “security,” checking files sent by users for viruses. The story with the GUBPOiK employee seemed to be over. None of these publications sparked a wider public discussion. In February 2022, state channel STV claimed that “from the very first day of the existence of Black Book of Belarus an employee of GUBOPiK was among the administrators of the channel.” In July 2021, BYPOL released a video exposing the GUBOPiK agent Artur Gaiko, who helped the Telegram channel Black Book of Belarus in their efforts to de-anonymise security officers by accessing the internal databases and leaking the info on his colleagues. Former employees reported the details more than a year after the initial disclosure. BBB did not warn its readers that there was an mole within the project. Gaiko was removed from all chats of Black Book of Belarus only three weeks after the disclosure, following the advice from BYPOL (an organisation of former law enforcement employees who counter the Belarusian authorities) to continue to ‘behave as normal’. In addition, he was in the chat where the administrators of Nexta forwarded messages from their subscribers about security forces. Gaiko also had access to the bot of the channel All Violations and the chat to which messages from subscribers of the channel Karateli Belarus were forwarded. During the time that GUBOPiK employee Artur Gaiko had access to the bots of the main and regional channels of Black Book of Belarus, about 8,500 users wrote in them. This is a story of the most successful infiltration, to date, of a security officer among opposition activists. In July 2021, the administrators of The Black Book realised that all this time they had been working side by side with Artur Gaiko, an employee of GUBOPiK (The Main Directorate for Combating Organised Crime and Corruption of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus), the notorious anti-extremism unit responsible for the most cruel tactics against the protesters.
He had access to tips and internal chat groups of several protest initiatives, communicated with and even made friends with BBB employees, could find out whether a criminal case had been opened against a person, and allegedly helped people leave the country. From October 2020, the team behind The Black Book of Belarus, a Telegram channel dedicated to revealing identities of security officers responsible for repression against the protesters, included a “security specialist” who maintained anonymity, not showing his face to his colleagues.
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