Belarussian policemen detain a protester in central Minsk, Monday (Photo: Reuters)
Three Ukrainian feminists who staged a topless protest mocking the Belarussian strongman were "kidnapped" by security services who forced them to strip naked in a forest and threatened to torch them, the group charged Tuesday.
The three members of the radical Femen group had gone missing after their protest Monday outside the offices of the Belarussian KGB security services to mark President Alexander Lukashenko's disputed re-election a year ago.
"They were blindfolded and driven around in a bus all night," Femen said in a statement giving an account of the ordeal by the women who claimed they were kidnapped by KGB agents and police from a railway station in Minsk.
"They were taken into the woods, had oil poured on them, were forced to take their clothes off, were threatened to be set on fire," Femen said, adding that the women's abductors recorded the events on a video camera.
"They threatened them with a knife which they later used to cut off their hair," it said. "Then they threw them out into the woods naked and without documents."
The activists, identified as Inna Shevchenko, Oxana Shachko and Alexandra Nemchinova, eventually made it out of the woods and reached the village of Beki in the country's southeast.
The KGB declined to comment on the Femen statement.
Its spokesman Alexander Antonovich had described Monday's protest—in which one of the activists had impersonated the moustachioed strongman—as a "provocation".
Femen, a small but feisty feminist group, is known for staging eye-catching protests that frequently see them strip to the waist in public places.
"We are calling on everyone who can help take and hide the activists until employees of the Ukrainian embassy in Belarus arrive," the group said.
The Ukrainian embassy in Belarus said earlier it had looked for the women but had no information about them.
"It's like we are facing some kind of a wall," an embassy official said.
Police had earlier also said they had no information about the activists.
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