The prosecutor demanded that I. Gaponov and A. Breus be fined

March 10, Minsk /BELTA/. The state prosecutor demanded that the defendants Ivan Gaponov and Artem Breus be fined. He made this statement during the debates today at the hearing in the court of the Moscow district of Minsk on the case of participants in the mass riots of December 19, 2010, citizens of the Russian Federation Ivan Gaponov and Artem Breus, a BELTA correspondent reports. The state 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 House of Government," 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 basic units on each defendant (one basic 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 since 1995 he has been living in Belarus with his close relatives. 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-