INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Belarus on Tuesday detained at least 24 people, including recently freed political prisoners, Minsk's leading rights group said, warning
families of regime critics to be vigilant.Ruled by President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994, Belarus has for almost four years brutally
cracked down on anyone who took part in massive anti-regime protests in 2020."There are arrests all over the country," Viasna, a rights
group that monitors arrests, said on its website."Among them are former political prisoners that have been freed but stayed in Belarus," it
added.Hundreds of thousands fled Belarus, mainly to neighboring Poland but also to Lithuania, since the mass 2020 protests.Belarus, whose
security service is still called the KGB as it was in the Soviet era, has gone after the remaining pockets of dissent still inside the
country."KGB employees are en masse going to the relatives of political prisoners and former political prisoners," Viasna warned.It called
Lukashenko and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin this week.The country's exiled opposition leader, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, warned of
"another wave of searches and mass detentions in Belarus.""The regime's thugs have targeted former political prisoners and the families of
those currently held," she said in a post on Twitter.Protests erupted in Belarus in 2020 after Lukashenko was accused of rigging an
election, which the opposition says was actually won by Tsikhanouskaya.She later fled the country after the regime brutally suppressed the
serving an 11-year sentence and her health is believed to have seriously degraded in prison.Isolated for years, Belarus has become even more
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