ST. GALLEN - Harauski, 48, is known in the Swiss-German record as Juri Garawski. He told Swiss asylum officials, after fleeing to Switzerland in October 2018, that he had served in Belarus's SOBR special unit and had taken part in the abduction and killing of three opponents of President Alexander Lukashenko. Former interior minister Yuri Zakharenko vanished from central Minsk in May 1999. Two further opposition figures were seized that September. Their bodies have never been found. A 2004 Council of Europe inquiry traced the abductions toward the centre of power in Minsk. Harauski named places, participants and sequences. Prosecutors, relatives and NGOs, including Trial International, built a case on a United Nations offence that lets Switzerland try enforced disappearance even when the crime, the victims and the suspect are all foreign, provided the acts were done for a state or with its approval.
Why the first court let him go
The Rorschach district court acquitted him in September 2023. His testimony had tangled itself in contradictions about vehicles, weapons and the light at the scene. On appeal, an expert report found more than a thousand translation errors in that first hearing, and the cantonal court set those statements aside as unreliable. It relied instead on what he had told investigators earlier, which it called credible and detailed. On that basis it quashed the acquittal for Krasouski.
It upheld acquittals on the other counts. In Zakharenko's case the court accepted that Harauski, then 20, did not know the man would be killed. He said he thought the former minister would be taken to a forest, frightened, and brought back. On a further count the court found the private prosecutors had no standing to appeal. Cooperation with the inquiry and an apology to relatives were weighed in sentencing. The offence can carry up to eight years. He can still appeal.
What a Swiss courtroom is being asked to settle
The NZZ read the guilty verdict as the first time a court has judicially tied the 1999 removals to the Lukashenko government, because the charge itself requires state involvement. That reading will be tested when the written judgment appears, and again if there is a further appeal. Switzerland has used this kind of case before. Last week the Federal Supreme Court left Erwin Sperisen's sentence in place over killings in Guatemalan prisons. Monday's decision in St. Gallen is narrower, and it is not yet the last word, but it puts a Swiss canton at the centre of a crime committed in Minsk 27 years ago.