"We ask you to hold hearings on the disappearance, deaths and imprisonment of Belarusian political leaders," read the letter, addressed to all factions, which reached the Parliament on Feb. 14.
"We have exhausted the possibilities to learn the truth about the tragic events that happened to our relatives. Therefore we are turning to you as the closest neighbor to Belarus not indifferent to the development of democratic rights and freedoms," it continued.
The document was signed by the wives of Gennady Karpenko, deputy speaker of the Belarusian Supreme Council who died under suspicious circumstances, Yury Zakharenko, a former interior minister allegedly kidnapped, Viktor Gonchar, the missing deputy speaker of the Belarusian Supreme Council, Anatoly Krasovsky, a missing businessman, Dmitry Zavadsky, a reporter for the Russian television channel ORT who went missing at Minsk's airport, and Andrei Klimov, a Supreme Council member currently in custody who was the initiator of impeachment procedures against Belarus' hardline President Alyaksandr Lukashenka.
They asked Lithuanian MPs to support their demand to establish an independent international commission to investigate the circumstances surrounding the disappearance and probable deaths of their relatives.
Zakharenko and Gonchar went missing in September 1999 and Zavadsky in July 2000.
Karpenko, a critic of Lukashenka, died unexpectedly in April 1999. Klimov was imprisoned in 1998 after trying to initiate an impeachment against the president.
According to the letter, investigations into the circumstances of the disappearances are only formal and do not take into account the political version of events, while a probe into Karpenko's death was never started.
Gediminas Dalinkevicius, head of the Lithuanian parliamentary human rights committee, was not available for comment, saying he was not familiar with the document.
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