MOSCOW, April 23. /TASS/. Relatives of Moldova’s opposition politicians who attended a congress in Moscow are subjected to pressure and intimidation, the head of Moldova's Gagauz Autonomy, Executive Secretary of the Victory political bloc, Yevgenia Gutsul has said.
"Today there were searches of people who had attended a meeting in Moscow. Unfortunately, those people's families are also subjected to pressure and threats, too. Our visits to Russia each time become more and more frightening for the Moldovan authorities," she said on the Soloviev Live TV channel.
She added that it would be impossible to hold the congress in Moldova because of the obstacles put up by the country's authorities.
Earlier, a representative of the Revival Party, Olesya Vitnyanskaya, told the media that the Moldovan authorities were trying to intimidate the delegates of the opposition congress returning from Moscow.
The leaders of a number of Moldovan opposition parties gathered in Moscow on April 21 to announce their unification into the political bloc called Victory. It will be in opposition to the pro-European Action and Solidarity Party, which controls the country's parliament and government. The congress participants stressed that such a meeting would be impossible in Moldova, where, they said, the opposition is being persecuted for criticizing the country's pro-European course. The Moldovan government has already called these politicians "criminals and traitors to the motherland."
On April 22, police detained participants in the Moscow congress for several hours at Chisinau airport on various pretexts and searched some of them. A number of the detainees said that small amounts of cash up to a thousand euros, which, according to Moldovan laws, can be freely brought into the country, had been confiscated. Later, the deputy head of the Moldovan Anti-Corruption Center Victor Furtuna said that police on April 22-23 conducted 150 overnight searches.