Hundreds arrested as police use stun grenades to disperse Belarus protest

Police in Belarus used stun grenades and tear gas in an attempt to break up a protest in the capital Minsk as weekly demonstrations against President Alexander Lukashenko showed no signs of ending.

The protester’s anger has been further raised by the recent death of an opposition activist.

Roman Bondarenko died in Minsk earlier in the week a day after he was arrested by police following a dispute in a city square that has become a regular meeting place for the opposition.

Armed and masked police were quick to intervene in Sunday’s demo, according to local media, deploying water cannon, beating protesters and bundling them into vans.

Belarusian rights group Viasna said at least 328 people were detained, including journalists.

Some 15 metro stations were closed and mobile internet access was limited, an AFP journalist reported.

The death of Bodorenko was the latest fatality since the mass protests began in August, sparked by Lukashenko’s disputed victory in the presidential election.

Lukashenko said on Friday he had asked investigators to probe the incident “honestly and objectively”.

Exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya described the former soldier as a “man who was killed because he wanted to live in a free country”.

On Sunday she described the crackdown on protesters with “gas, grenades, and firearms” as “devastating” and called for international support for the demonstrators.

“We ask our allies to stand up for the Belarusian people and human rights. We need a humanitarian corridor for the injured, support for the media, international investigation of crimes,” she wrote on Twitter.

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