Belarusian opposition leader Severinets freed from penitentiary
MINSK. Oct 19 (Interfax) - Pavel Severinets, a co-chairman of the Belarusian Christian Democracy party, was freed from a correctional facility on Saturday morning after serving his term, the party told Interfax.
"Yes, he is free already, his term expired today, and he was freed," it said.
Various online resources reported on Saturday that Severinets was supposed to be released from an open-type correctional facility in the village of Kuplin in the Brest region at about 10:00 a.m., and journalists planned to gather at the exit by this time. However, penitentiary workers woke Severinets up at night and put him on a train heading from Brest to Moscow, which arrived in Minsk in the morning.
Severinets, who headed the campaign staff of former presidential candidate Vitaly Rymashevsky, was sentenced to 3 years of freedom restriction for participating in a protest rally against the official outcome of the election on December 19, 2010.