Roman Protasevich
Twitter blocks new account of Belarusian activist Protasevich
Minsk/UNI/Sputnik: The new Twitter account of Roman Protasevich, the Belarusian opposition activist whose removal from a Ryanair commercial steel bird caused widespread controversy, was blocked on Monday, despite claims that he manages the account unsupervised from under house arrest.
"Account suspended. Twitter suspends accounts which violate the Twitter Rules," the message on his new page says.
After saying that his previous account was blocked, Protasevich created a new one on July 7. He answered some of the users' questions about his life while under house arrest. However, despite saying that he is managing his page "unsupervised," some users doubted that Protasevich was the actual creator of the content.
On May 23, a Ryanair flight 4978 travelling from Greece to Lithuania made an emergency landing in Minsk, over a bomb threat that turned out to be fake.
Two passengers aboard the aircraft, Protasevich, a co-founder of a Telegram channel that Minsk has designated as extremist, and his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, who is suspected of publishing the private data of Belarusian security services officers, were detained during the stopover at the airport.
Protasevich is charged with several articles, including one on "organizing mass riots," and faces up to 15 years in prison.
In June, both Protasevich, who applied for a pretrial agreement on cooperation with the investigation and gave a consistent confession, and Russian national Sapega were moved from custody to house arrest.
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