The authorities in the Serbian town of Zaichar hushed up a case of abuse in which an eleven-year-old boy with Bulgarian and Serbian citizenship has been stripped naked and insulted, his mother claims.

Lazarina Jankovic was born in Bulgaria and is married to a Serb. The couple and their son live in a village in the district of Zaichar.

Jankovic has sent an open letter to President Georgi Parvanov and the Foreign Minister Ivaylo Kalfin with a request for assistance in protecting the rights of her son.

The mother recounted the distress her son was put through in an interview for 24 Hours daily. In her words the boy went to a local shop to buy watercolours, when two men knocked him down on a chair, pulled off his pants and started calling him names. The humiliation stopped only after a casual passer-by intervened.

Police in the town of Zaichar launched, albeit unwillingly, an investigation into the case under the pressure of the Interior Ministry. The materials were submitted to the prosecutor's office and a court set a psychological expertise to determine how detrimental the abuse has been to the child.

The expertise has not been carried out yet.

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