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The BBC writes that he faces up to 12 years in prison according to the first article, 3 years for the second and 15 years for the third.
Last Sunday, a Ryanair passenger plane flying from Athens to Vilnius forcibly landed at Minsk airport. He had approached Lithuanian airspace, but was forced to head to the capital of Belarus.
Ryanair reported that the plane with more than 100 passengers landed at Minsk airport when Belarusian air traffic controllers reported a possible security threat on board. This information was not confirmed later.
R. Pratasevičius, 26, a journalist, activist and one of the founders of the opposition information channel Nexta, flew this plane. When the plane landed in Minsk, he was arrested, as was his 23-year-old girl, S. Sapega, a Russian citizen and a student at the European University of Humanities in Vilnius.
Sapega is suspected in Belarus of certain crimes allegedly committed after the controversy in the 2020 presidential elections. A video was published the day before in which the suspect said that he had edited the Telegram channel, The Black Book of Belarus, which published data on the country’s security forces.
Last year, the founders of Nexta, Sciapan Pucil, 22, and R. Pratasevich, 26, were included by Belarus in the list of “people involved in terrorist activities”, and the channel itself was declared “extremist”. and ordered to be blocked.
Following the August presidential elections, which the opposition and western democracies consider rigged, Belarus has been plagued by unprecedented mass protests for months. The winners of that vote were announced by authoritarian leader Aliaksandr Lukashenko, who has ruled the country with an iron fist for nearly three decades, although the opposition and Western countries consider the election rigged.
