On Wednesday, Vilnius police detained Algirdas Paleckis, a former Lithuanian politician convicted of spying for Russia, and took him to Vilnius Correctional Facility.
Paleckis "was detained before 15:00". Julija Samorokovskaja, spokesperson for Vilnius County Police, told BNS, adding that the man had been taken to the
The former leader of the Socialist People's Front denied any wrongdoing and asked the courts to acquit him.
"Algirdas is calm, firm and in a combative spirit. Because neither prison nor any persecution will stifle justice," Dawn of Justice, an organisation linked to Paleckis, posted on Facebook.
Paleckis has recently founded a new party, Dawn of Justice, and said he would run for president.
On May 6, the Lithuanian Court of Appeal upheld the regional court's ruling to sentence Paleckis to six years in prison. Earlier on Wednesday, Šiauliai Regional Court issued an order to enforce the ruling.
The 50-year-old man was out of custody until recently but remained under intensive supervision after paying a bail of 50,000 euros.
As the 18 months he spent in custody before his trial have been included in the prison time, Paleckis will serve around five years in jail.
Paleckis denies espionage charges, saying he was conducting a journalistic investigation.
He claims that he did not know about Russian citizens' ties with Russian secret services and was in contact with them purely for his journalistic and political activity, and also for reasons related to a business he was setting up jointly with Domantas Bertauskas.
Deimantas Bertauskas, a Vilnius businessman who stood trial along with Paleckis, was released from liability because he confessed and cooperated with law enforcement. He is now under the state's protection.
According to the case files, Paleckis and Bertauskas were tasked with collecting information on officers and judges who worked on the January 13 case in Lithuania.
In the 2010s, Paleckis was convicted of denying the Soviet aggression of January 13, 1991, when 14 people died after Soviet troops attempted to topple the Lithuanian government following the March 1990 independence declaration.
He claimed that the people were killed by "our own", repeating the Kremlin’s version of the events.
Born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1971, Paleckis holds degrees in journalism and international relations from Vilnius University and studied international relations at the International Institute of Administration in Paris between 1994 and 1995.
He started working at the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry, where he was responsible for relations with the European Union and its member states, in 1994 and took up the job of an adviser to a vice-speaker of the Seimas in 2003.
Paleckis served as a member of the Lithuanian parliament between 2004 and 2007.
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