Detail from an illustration of Raman Bondarenka by Belarusian artist Ania Redko, 2020. Used with permission. Belarus is in mourning. On November 20, thousands of protesters arrived at the Church of the Resurrection in the capital of Minsk to pay their respects to Raman Bondarenko, a 31-year-old activist who died in police custody. The mourners were not deterred by the cold. Winter has done little to diminish the protests which have seized the country since presidential elections in August. Their catalyst was an attempt by Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who has ruled Belarus since 1994, to stay in power for a sixth consecutive term. Those who take to the streets to oppose him have faced police violence, detention and torture. One symbol of this movement are ribbons in red and white, the colours of the country's previous national flag. They are now ubiquitous at mass protests as a sign of opposition to the government. So when Bondarenka spotted a group who had arrived to remove them from a courtyard near his home in Minsk on the evening of November 11, he headed out to confront them. The men beat Bondarenka so severely that he fell to the pavement, hitting his head several times during the attack. He was then driven away in a minibus and surfaced in police custody. By the evening of November 12, Bondareka lay in an intensive care unit at a city hospital, where he died of brain damage after several hours’ surgery. One of the first summaries of the event was provided by Anton Motolko's popular Telegram channel, which included some footage along with a summary: Приехали ябатьки с женщинами и детьми срезать ленты. Вышли люди. Завязалась драка. Повыскакивали челы в масках и запихнули человека в бус. “I'm with Batka” supporters arrived with women and children in order to cut ribbons. People came out. A fight ensued. Guys in masks appeared from nowhere and shoved a man into a bus. — @Motolkohelp, Telegram, November 11, 2020 The phrase “I'm with Batka”, using the president's folksy moniker, refers to a top-down attempt during the protests to launch a civic movement in support of Lukashenka. While the authorities have suggested that the group, all in plain clothes, were merely “concerned citizens”, the exact identity of Bondarenka's attackers remains unknown. When Lukashenka commented on Bondarenka's death on November 13, he described the assailants as one of 500 “public order squads” who aimed to remove “pro-Nazi symbols”. And while Belarusian officialdom has urged a transparent and thorough investigation, their line is simply this: Bondarenka got into a brawl between opposition and regime supporters. Lukashenka also affirmed the Investigative Committee's declaration that Bondarenka was found to have been drunk at the time of the fight. Yet this was denied wholesale by doctors in anonymous interviews to the prominent online news portal Tut.By. Bondarenko's mother later provided the independent newspaper Nasha Niva with scans of her son's blood test results, which showed zero percent ethanol. Katerina Borisevich, the Tut.By journalist who reported on the allegations of Bondarenka's drunkenness, was detained on November 19 and now faces criminal charges for disseminating confidential medical information. Furthermore, an investigation by the Russian investigative website MediaZona's identified further gaps in the official account of events. Through examining CCTV footage and interviewing residents near the scene of the attack, its journalists established that the police in fact arrived at the courtyard at 22:30, seemingly paying no attention to the minibus to which Bondarenko had been dragged against his will. This complicates accounts, including that of Lukashenka, that the police had themselves called an ambulance for Bondarenka. The same camera footage suggested that several of these individuals had surveyed the area well before removing the ribbons, implying something rather more organised than a spontaneous action by pro-Lukashenka supporters. And so, Belarusians’ anger at their government — though few if any protesters still consider it theirs — is now newly inflamed by the possibility of a cover-up. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Lukashenka's opponent in the election who has fled to the European Union, recently declared Bondarenka a “Hero of Belarus”. EU officials have threatened new sanctions against Belarusian officials, whom they hold responsible for Bondarenka's death. Bondarenka's last words, “I'm going out”, shared with a WhatsApp group for local residents, have become a rallying cry and a hashtag (#ЯВыхожу) for a new wave of demonstrations.