The Belarusian journalist and political prisoner Igor Lednik died in prison in the Mogilev region, as reported today by the Social Democratic Party of the former Soviet republic.
Lednik, whose health has deteriorated since his arrest in April 2022, according to his lawyers, had been sentenced to three years in prison for slandering the country's president, Alexandr Lukashenko, in power since 1994.
The opponent, who died at the age of 64 in Penitentiary Number 15, underwent surgery on his digestive system in prison and had heart problems.
Initially, he was sentenced to only fifteen days of house arrest, but was later sentenced to three years in prison for an article published in 2020 in which he attacked the honor and dignity of the head of state.
Lednik, whose Facebook was declared extremist, advocated the liquidation of the Russia-Belarus State Union and accused Lukashenko of turning the country into a dictatorship.
According to the human rights organization Viasná, Lednik is the fifth Belarusian political prisoner to die behind bars since May 2022.
The Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 2015, warned this week in an interview about the danger in which political prisoners find themselves in Belarus, after the death of the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, in an Arctic prison.
“There is no information about Maria Kolesnikova, Viktor Babariko. We don't know anything about Nikolai Statkevich. And it feels like we could find out the worst at any moment,” Alexievich told the newspaper 'Nasha Niva'.
The author of “Voices from Chernobyl” and “War Has No Woman's Face” recalled that the number of political prisoners in Belarus exceeds 2,000 and all its leaders are also behind bars.
According to Alexievich, “dictators learn from each other and Navalny's death opened an abyss of permissiveness” for authoritarian leaders around the world.
“Now everything can be expected,” he said.
Meanwhile, Lukashenko warned today in a meeting with the senior staff of the Belarusian Army that the opposition in exile together with “their sponsors from the foreign intelligence services” are preparing an action plan to overthrow the Government in Minsk.
“The first point of this plan (…) lies in preparing a coup d'état or a violent seizure of power directly in the middle of an electoral campaign,” he said.
However, he clarified that the opponents themselves “assess this as unlikely,” since they “do not see real preconditions similar to those of 2020 to destabilize the situation,” when the country was shaken by massive protests after the results of the presidential elections. , described as fraudulent by the opposition and the international community.
According to Lukashenko, the opposition will still try to “take advantage of the electoral campaign (of the next parliamentary elections) as a rehearsal and initial stage to prepare for a coup d'état during the upcoming presidential elections in 2025.”
EFE
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