Police arrived early this afternoon at the home of TV Republika CEO, Tomasz Sakiewicz. Officers put handcuffs on the station president’s assistant. An officer announced that she had been detained in connection with a misdemeanor.
“The police forcibly entered my home and arrested my assistant,” Tomasz Sakiewicz reported on social media.
“Half an hour ago [around 1:30 p.m.], police forcibly entered my home, handcuffed my assistant, claiming that there was a child in danger here. They said they would remove the handcuffs once she identified herself, but that was impossible because she was handcuffed. They made it impossible from the start. They tried to take her out, I followed them. The police refused to identify themselves or say who they were, they were in uniform. They behaved like bandits,” Sakiewicz reported.
“They searched my apartment without my permission and without any warrant. My apartment is also one of the editorial offices, so journalistic confidentiality was also violated. They were thugs dressed in police uniforms, pretending to be police officers,” said the CEO of TV Republika, Tomasz Sakiewicz.
He added that his assistant was handcuffed because, according to the officers, “she was interfering with the intervention.”
Interestingly, he was not handcuffed. He was filming them. The officers did not want to talk to him; he demanded it because it was his apartment. “They had no warrant and entered his rooms,” said Tomasz Sakiewicz.
The CEO of TV Republika added that he ran after the officers, at which point they released the woman and fled without identifying themselves, saying that “the intervention was over.”
They drove away at full speed from what was effectively the scene of a crime they had committed, he said. Tomasz Sakiewicz pointed out that the officers present in his apartment were persistently avoiding identifying themselves.
In recent days, attacks on TV Republika journalists have intensified. Within just a few hours, there were several police interventions during which officers contacted both the station’s journalists and editors of other outlets within the Free Speech Zone. Many of these interventions involved reports alleging that either deceased persons were supposedly present in the homes of independent media employees or that someone “might be planning suicide.”