Lietuvos nacionalinis radijas ir televizija:
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya / AP
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the opposition candidate in Belarus‘ presidential election, is in Lithuania, Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius said on Tuesday morning. He later said that her children were also in the country.
“She arrived in Lithuania and is safe now,” he told BNS on Tuesday morning.
Linkevičius later told LRT TV that Tikhanovskaya arrived in Lithuania on Tuesday night.
“The night was tense, she was detained for a very long time, some seven hours. We didn’t know the circumstances of her detention nor her whereabouts,” he said.
“There was a threat [to Tikhanovkaya]. After I’d been trying to contact her for several hours, unsuccessfully, we started a search. There was a lot of communicating throughout the night, everyone was concerned,” Linkevičius told LRT TV. “She is now in a safe country, which is the most important thing.”
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On Monday, Tikhanovskaya refused to concede victory to Alexander Lukashenko whom the officially announced results gave 80 percent of the vote.
Opponents to Lukashenko’s autocratic rule maintain the results were rigged and Tikhanovskaya said she was the real winner.
Thousands of people have taken to the streets in Minsk and other Belarusian cities to protest the result of Sunday’s controversial presidential election.
Tikhanovskaya, a 37-year-old teacher of English, decided to run for president after her husband, Sergey Tikhanovsky, a popular blogger, was arrested. She has promised to hold a new, fair election if elected.
A number of members of her election campaign have been arrested over the past week, too.
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Mindaugo Bridge in Vilnius / S. Žiūra/LRT
On Monday, four bridges in Vilnius were illuminated in the white–red–white colours of the Belarusian flag used by the opposition.
“Vilnius is sending a message of support to the democracy-seeking Belarus,” the city’s authorities said in a statement.
