On July 3, Minsk celebrated the “official” Independence Day. Hundreds of thousands gathered for a late-night concert at a local war memorial. The president himself was there.

After midnight, the unheard of happened. A bomb exploded injuring at least 50 people. Strangely, the president, who was not far away, was not taken to safety by the security forces. To the contrary, he appeared at the site of the bombing within minutes. Strangely, the concert was not stopped and the festivities continued, even though another explosive device was found by the police.

The opposition unanimously condemned this act of terror and called upon the authorities to conduct fair and open investigation. The opposition expressed hope that the explosion would not result in a new wave of repressions against the opposition activists.

Both the United States and Russia offered help to investigate the accident. The Belarusian government accepted help from the latter but also did not refuse some assistance from the former.

Lukashenka in his recent interview promised not to organize witch hunt, but said that the response to the organizers of the blast would be harsh whoever they were.

I guess there’s hardly a blogger in Belarus who hasn’t commented on the bomb blast. People are guessing what happened and what consequences it would have. There are lots of different versions, but I doubt there is much sense to recapitulate them here. One is for sure. This is the first major terror act in Belarus. Even if the regime itself is not involved (and most probably, it isn’t as many prominent analysts, like Silitski and Feduta, think), there’s a damn good pretense to use this bomb blast for intimidation of the opposition. The blast is especially handy for this matter, as it happened a few days after the parliamentary race had officially started in Belarus.