Belarus hands 8-year term to journalist for top Polish paper

By YURAS KARMANAU
Associated Press

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — A Belarusian court has sentenced a journalist and prominent member of the country’s Polish minority to eight years in prison, amid an ongoing crackdown on government critics. Andrzej Poczobut, 49, was found guilty Wednesday of harming Belarus’ national security and “inciting discord” in a closed trial held in the city of Grodno. Poczobut, a reporter for top Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, covered the mass protests that gripped Belarus for weeks following the 2020 presidential election that the opposition and the West decried as a sham. He has been in detention since March 2021. Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya in a Twitter post Wednesday described the verdict against Poczobut as Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko’s “personal revenge.”