Jailed Belarusian blogger Ihar Losik on hunger strike for 28 days

On Jan­u­ary 10, there were reports about the trans­fer of the blog­ger from the remand prison in Zhodz­i­na to anoth­er loca­tion, but the infor­ma­tion turned out to be false, his wife Darya Losik said. Lit­tle is known about the probe into Ihar’s case, because his lawyer Dzmit­ry Lep­re­tar had to sign a non-dis­clo­sure agree­ment.

The man has already spent 198 days in cus­tody; on Decem­ber 15, he start­ed hunger-strik­ing.

Ihar Losik is known as an admin­is­tra­tor of the pop­u­lar Telegram chan­nel Belam­o­va which active­ly cov­ered the events around the 2020 elec­tion cam­paign in Belarus. On June 25, his place in the town of Baranavichy was searched; the man was then arrest­ed. Human rights activists recog­nised Losik as a polit­i­cal pris­on­er and urged the Belaru­sian aithor­i­ties to imme­di­ate­ly release him.

He was charged under Arti­cle 342–1 of the Crim­i­nal Code (‘organ­i­sa­tion and prepa­ra­tion of actions that gross­ly vio­late pub­lic order’) and Art. 293 (‘prepa­ra­tion for par­tic­i­pat­ing in mass riots’).

Plead­ing not guilty and con­sid­ers his crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion to be polit­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed, he went on an indef­i­nite hunger strike ‘until all accu­sa­tions were dropped or the mea­sure of restraint was changed’. Accord­ing to Losik, he has already spent half a year in prison on ‘the absurd charge’; he ‘would have had to use a tele­porter’ in order to com­mit that crime, he stressed in his address pub­lished on Telegram.

Lat­er, how­ev­er, the deten­tion peri­od for the polit­i­cal pris­on­er was extend­ed by three months, until March 25.

полностью: https://news.tut.by/society/714344.html?c