The attendees taken into custody last week were reportedly arrested for ‘neonazism’.

“The Ministry of Internal Affairs claims, without substantiation, that it broke up ‘an illegal extremist-neonazi event’,” independent Belarusian news outlet Nasha Niva reports.

Charges of ‘extremism,’ among them of ‘neonazism,’ are often used by Minsk to excuse the arrest and and leveling charges against political dissidents opposed to the regime of Alexander Lukashenko.

The raid was conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) unit of police, which is widely recognized as a ‘political police’ in Belarus, that acted on a tip-off reporting “an illegal mass event.”

Video recordings of the event published by the independent Zerkalo.io news website show the festival attendees being dragged out of their tents and slammed face-down into the ground.

MIA boasted of arresting 56 individuals from Minsk, Hrodna (Grodno), Vitsyebsk (Vitebsk), Brest, Pinsk, and Luliniets. Among the detained were, allegedly, persons “connected to extremist activities, among them the riots of 2020,” referring to the mass demonstrations protesting the falsified results of the 2020 presidential elections, which supposedly delivered Aleksandr Lukashenko a sixth term in power.

As the regime’s ministry reported, the detained included people who were “kin of the participants of the military actions in Ukraine,” which vague statement could refer to the Kastus’ Kalinouski of Belarusian volunteers fighting on the Ukrainian side.

As Zerkalo.io pointed out, the images and videos published by the Belarusian MIA display supposed ‘extremist’ symbols such as traditional Belarusian national symbols, which the Lukashenko regime is trying to eradicate in favor of Soviet-era symbolism.