Reporter Viorica Tătaru of the Chisinau-based TV8 channel was released together with her colleague Andrei Captarenco after being detained separately and interrogated for several hours by the de facto authorities of Transnistria. According to the TV station, the two were told to erase everything they recorded covering a protest rally in the region today.

“I came here to cover the protests that had been announced a while ago by the so-called Transnistrian authorities. We tried to ask people what their demands were, why they were protesting, the typical questions you’d ask at any other rally. But we were detained straight away, taken to the so-called security ministry and interrogated for more than two hours”.

The journalists were eventually released and taken to a demarcation crossing. “They probably wanted to make sure we left the territory of the so-called Transnistria”, they say.

While they erased the footage as told, the reporters said the demonstrators had trouble explaining why they took to the streets. “Everything we managed to film up until the moment of detention they forced us to delete, we don’t have on record the conversations we had with the people. Many people didn’t know why they were there and couldn’t explain the slogans on their placards. This frustrated those officers. Their first question was: why did you ask the protesters if it was them who wrote the message or someone else? They also interrogated us in front of a camera”, said Tătaru.

The protest in Tiraspol was organized by the de facto Transnistrian administration against the new provisions of Moldovan Customs Code, which introduces a uniform tax regime across the Republic of Moldova, including Transnistria. Tiraspol denounced the measure as an “economic blockade”.