Belarus hands six-year jail sentence to dissident's girlfriend after forced plane landing

A Belarusian court on Friday sentenced Sofia Sapega, the girlfriend of a dissident detained after their commercial flight was forced to land in Belarus last year, to six years in prison for inciting social hatred, the Vyasna rights group said.

The 24-year-old Russian citizen was flying with her boyfriend Roman Protasevich, a dissident blogger critical of Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, on a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius in May 2021 when it was diverted to Minsk by Belarusian authorities.

Belarus said at the time it had ordered the plane to land after an anonymous tip-off that there was a bomb onboard. The bomb threat turned out to be false, and Protasevich and Sapega were immediately detained.

The diversion of a commercial flight to detain the pair prompted international outrage and prompted the European Union and US to impose more sanctions against Belarus.

Protasevich has yet to go on trial and the status of the investigation against him is unclear.

The blogger, who fled Belarus in 2019, had worked as an editor at the Poland-based Nexta Live channel on the Telegram messenger app. The channel, which is openly hostile to Lukashenko, played an important role in broadcasting and co-ordinating huge opposition protests in 2020.

The mass protests were sparked by anger over what the opposition said was a rigged presidential election that gave Lukashenko his sixth term in power. Lukashenko denied stealing the election and cracked down hard on the opposition, whose leading members were jailed or forced to flee abroad.

Reuters