Belarusian presidential candidate Tikhanovskaya in Lithuania, says Foreign Ministry

Belarusian presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is in Lithuania, the country’s Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius said on Tuesday.

"Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is safe. She is in Lithuania," he wrote on Twitter.

In an interview with the national radio LRT, Linkevicius also said that Tikhanovskaya arrived in Lithuania after spending seven hours in detention on the territory of Belarus.

"The main thing is that she is safe, since she was detained in Belarus before and spent about seven hours in detention," he said. The minister has not yet specified how and for how long Tikhanovskaya arrived in Vilnius and what she plans to do.

On Monday, first runner-up in the Belarusian presidential elections Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in her complaint to the Central Election Committee demanded to declare the published results of the vote void and recount the votes at some polls or conduct a repeat election. She also said that she saw no grounds for her detention and was not going to leave Belarus.

On Monday, chief of the country’s State Security Committee (KGB) Valery Vakulchik that Belarusian security services had prevented an assassination attempt on Tikhanovskaya. According to him, officers of the law enforcement agencies guarded the united headquarters of the opposition in order to prevent the emergence of "a sacred sacrifice."