A court in Belarus has sentenced the girlfriend of a dissident blogger who was detained after their commercial flight was forced to land in Minsk to six years in prison for inciting social hatred.
Prosecutors said the regional court in the western city of Hrodno handed down the sentence against Sofia Sapega, a 24-year-old Russian citizen, on May 6.
The court issued the ruling after a six-week trial ordered held behind closed doors, saying that personal data of officials might be discussed in open court, according to the rights group Vyasna.
Sapega was accused of administering a channel on the Telegram messenger app that published the personal data of Belarusian security forces.
She and her boyfriend, Raman Pratasevich, were flying on a Ryanair commercial flight from Athens to Vilnius in May 2021 when it was diverted to Minsk by Belarusian authorities.
Belarus said it had ordered the plane to land after an anonymous bomb threat. Evidence later revealed Belarusian officials conspired to fake the bomb threat as a pretense for diverting the plane so they could detain Pratasevich and Sapega.
SEE ALSO: UN Report Says Bomb Threat That Diverted Plane To Belarus Was 'Deliberately False'Pratasevich, who fled Belarus in 2019, worked as an editor at the Poland-based Nexta Live channel on Telegram. He has yet to go on trial and the status of the investigation against him is unclear.
The Telegram channel, which is openly hostile to authoritarian Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka, played an important role in broadcasting opposition reports and coordinating mass protests against Lukashenka sparked by anger over an August 2020 election that he claimed to win but that opposition groups and Western governments said was rigged.
Lukashenka denied stealing the election and has since cracked down hard on the opposition, whose leading members were jailed or forced to flee the country.