The 51-year-old was sentenced in February 2023 to eight years in prison in Belarus. He is a journalist in the leading Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
– I want to assure you that efforts to release other political prisoners, including Andrzej Poczobut, are ongoing in other tracks, says Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski to the press on Friday.
– I think about him every day, he continued.
Poland released a Russian-born Spanish freelance journalist accused of spying for Russia.
Former Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski from the PiS party, who lost power in October, accuses the government of not getting anything in return for the release
– The negotiations on the prisoner exchange have been going on for at least a year and a half, writes Kaminski on X. He added that he held talks with American officials about the exchange when he himself was a minister.
– Our demands for the exchange were that Andrzej Poczobut should be released to Poland, he wrote.
German Rico Krieger (30), a health worker who has been imprisoned in Belarus, was part of the prisoner exchange.
PiS has asked the government for a formal explanation of what steps they have taken to release Poczobut.
Poczobut’s colleagues have said that the journalist has not received the necessary health care and that his condition is ailing.
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2024-08-03 04:35:59
