Belarusian dissident Tikanovskaya instigates the death of her imprisoned husband

Svetlana Dikhanovkaya, the head of the Belarusian opposition party in exile, announced that she had been informed by a stranger about the possible death in prison of her husband Sergei, whom she had not heard from since March.

Sergei Dikhanovsky was sentenced to 18 years in prison in December 2021, including for a “massive system of unrest” in a country allied with Moscow and ruled by Alexander Lukashenko with an iron fist since 1994.

Before the 2020 presidential election, Mr. The conviction is widely seen as a political vendetta against a man who challenged Lukashenko, sparking a massive protest movement.

“Today I received the most strange and horrifying news. “An unknown person wrote that my husband Sergey Sodino died in prison,” Ms. Dikhanovskaya wrote on Twitter on Monday evening, adding that “there is still no evidence for this assertion.”

According to her, this is not the first time that rumors of her husband’s death have been spread, but the opponent has had no news about him since March 9 and “lawyers have no right to see”.

“I have not received any letters, no contact from lawyers,” he said on Facebook.

“This is a new attempt by the regime to put pressure not only on political prisoners, those who have lost all contact with the outside world and are detained in terrible conditions, but also on their relatives who are forced to live without any information,” condemned Svetlana Tikanovskaya.

“I worry about Sergey every day. It’s very difficult to live when you don’t know if your husband is alive or not,” she added.

During the 2020 presidential election, opposition leader Svetlana Tikanovskaya faced a crackdown by the authorities and was exiled like thousands of her compatriots.

He was sentenced in March to 15 years in prison on a dozen charges, including “conspiracy to seize power.” Many opponents have received very harsh sentences in Belarus.