Poland's interior minister said on Saturday he has suspended an agreement between a Polish and a Belarusian police academy because of recent police violence against protesters in Belarus

Poland's interior minister said on Saturday he has suspended an agreement between a Polish and a Belarusian police academy because of recent police violence against protesters in Belarus. Police forces in Belarus have been cracking down on demonstrators protesting Oct. 17's referendum, which was widely seen as fraudulent. The vote allowed pro-Moscow authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko to seek a third term in power. "We cannot have a cooperative agreement between our police school and the Belarusian academy in a situation when Belarusian police beat up demonstrators fighting for democratic freedoms," Interior Minister Ryszard Kalisz said. A police school in the northern Polish city of Szczytno signed an agreement for student exchanges with a school in the Belarusian capital of Minsk earlier this month. Electoral officials said 77 percent of Belarusian voters supported the referendum to scrap the two-term limit on presidents. International observers and an independent exit poll suggested the voting was neither free nor fair.