Belarusian opposition journalist Igor Lednik dies in prison, arrested for “slandering” President Lukashenko

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.

Lednikwhose health has deteriorated since his arrest in April 2022, was, according to his lawyers, sentenced to three years in prison for slandering the country’s president, Alexander Lukashenkoin power since 1994.

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He adversarywho died at the age of 64 in Penitentiary Number 15, He underwent digestive system surgery in prison and had heart problems.

He was initially sentenced to just 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.

Lednikwhose Facebook account was declared extremist, He 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.

Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievichwinner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, warned this week in an interview of the danger facing political prisoners in Belarus, following the death of the leader of the Russian opposition, Alexey Navalnyin an arctic prison.

“There is no information about Maria Kolesnikova, Viktor Babariko. We don’t know anything about Nikolai Statkevich. And it seems like we could discover the worst at any time,” he said. Alexievich to the newspaper ‘Nasha Niva’.

The author of “Voices from Chernobyl” It is “War does not have a woman’s face” he recalled that The number of political prisoners in Belarus exceeds 2,000 and all of its leaders are also behind bars.

According to Alexievich“dictators learn from each other and the death of Navalny has opened a chasm of permissiveness” for authoritarian leaders around the world.

“Now you can wait for everything”he opined.

While, Lukashenko warned today in a meeting with senior Army officials Belarus that the opposition in exile together with “their foreign intelligence sponsors” They prepare an action plan to overthrow the Minsk Government.

“The first point of this plan (…) lies in the preparation of 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 conditions similar to those of 2020 to destabilize the situation”, when the country was shaken by massive protests following the results of the presidential elections. , described as fraudulent by the opposition and the international community.

According to Lukashenkothe opposition will also try to “use the electoral campaign (of the next legislative elections) as a rehearsal and initial phase to prepare a coup d’état during the next presidential elections in 2025”.

Source: Elcomercio

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I am Jack Morton and I work in 24 News Recorder. I mostly cover world news and I have also authored 24 news recorder. I find this work highly interesting and it allows me to keep up with current events happening around the world.