Belarusian security services shot dead a foreign citizen in Grodno near the Polish border on Sunday, who Minsk claims was planning a terrorist attack.
The security service announced that the “terrorist” was killed in the shooting. Belarusian television, controlled by the Lukashenko regime, reports that a fake Russian passport was found near the body.
“The special services have worked perfectly. An entire arsenal of weapons and explosives, intended for high-level terrorist attacks on citizens and government officials, was confiscated,” Lukashenko announced.
After the drone attack on the Russian warplane A-50, which was stationed at the Machulishchu military airfield in Belarus on February 26, the authorities of Minsk carried out a series of searches and arrests.
The Belarusian human rights organization “Vyasna” (“Spring”) reports that more than 100 people have been detained.
Alexander Azarov, head of the opposition movement BYPOL, who claimed responsibility for the attack on the A-50 plane, told the AP news agency that he had nothing to do with what happened in Grodno.
He believes that the Belarusian authorities, supposedly, organized these incidents themselves in order to discredit the opposition and create an image of a threat from NATO and Poland.
“Lukashenko plays the situation in order to intensify the repression inside the country and show the Kremlin that he is fighting both the local opposition and the Western intelligence services,” Azarov said.