Maria Kolesnikova had joined forces with the opposition presidential candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.
Masked men detained Belarusian protest leader Maria Kolesnikova in central Minsk on Monday morning and took her away in a van. Two of her allies also disappeared later, the opposition movement said.
Kolesnikova, a member of the opposition coordination council, is the last of three remaining female politicians in Belarus who joined forces ahead of the August 9 presidential election to try to challenge veteran incumbent Alexander Lukashenko.
A vocal critic of Lukashenko, she has played a significant role in weeks of mass demonstrations and strikes by protesters accusing Lukashenko of rigging his re-election.
Lukashenko, who has been in power for the past 26 years, denies that accusation and has accused foreign powers of trying to overthrow him in a revolution. He has responded with an offensive that, according to some detainees, includes torture and beatings.
Three European Union diplomats told Reuters that the EU is preparing to impose economic sanctions on 31 top Belarusian officials, including the interior minister, in response to the elections and the subsequent crackdown.
Lukashenko, facing his deepest crisis yet, retains the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who promised to send policemen to support him if necessary.
Kolesnikova’s kidnapping, if confirmed, comes as Belarusian authorities appear to be stepping up their efforts to try to stop the protests and obstruct the work of the opposition council, which they have accused of plotting to overthrow Lukashenko.
On Sunday, tens of thousands of people demonstrated across the country demanding Lukashenko’s resignation. Security forces detained 633 protesters, Belarusian authorities said.
Masked men
Russian news agency Interfax quoted Minsk police as saying they had not detained Kolesnikova.
One witness, Anastasia, was subpoenaed by the Tut. The news outlet said it had seen Kolesnikova pushed Kolesnikova into a dark-colored van by masked men in plain clothes in the center of Minsk.
He said that Kolesnikova’s mobile phone had fallen to the ground during the fight and that one of the masked men detaining her had picked it up before the truck sped away.
The opposition council said that two other activists, Anton Rodnenkov and Ivan Kravtsov, disappeared shortly after, and said authorities appeared to be systematically targeting their members.
“It is obvious that these methods are illegal and cannot lead to anything other than an escalation in the situation in the country, deepening the crisis and fueling protests,” he said in a statement.
“We see that the authorities have begun to openly use terror tactics in recent days,” he added, calling the actions crimes against humanity.
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius compared what had happened to Kolesnikova to something that the Stalin-era secret police would have done in the Soviet Union.
“Instead of talking to the people of Belarus, the outgoing leadership is cynically trying (to) eliminate them one by one,” he wrote on Twitter.
“The kidnapping … is a disgrace. The Stalinist methods of the NKVD are being applied in 21st century Europe. It must be released immediately.”
Before the elections, Kolesnikova had joined forces with the opposition presidential candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who later fled to Lithuania, and with Veronika Tsepkalo, who has since left for Poland.
Another prominent activist, Olga Kovalkova, arrived in Poland on Saturday and said she had been told that she would be arrested if she stayed in Belarus.
The crisis is affecting the economy of Belarus. Central bank figures released Monday showed that the former Soviet republic had spent nearly a sixth of its gold and foreign exchange reserves, or $ 1.4 billion, in August, as it struggled to prop up its ruble currency during the wave of unrest.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
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