You're reading: Polish reporter, cameraman briefly held in Belarus

WARSAW, June 15 (Reuters) - Belarus militia briefly detained a Polish radio reporter and a cameraman working for Polish state-owned television in Grodno near the Polish border, Poland's foreign ministry said on Wednesday.

Radio TOK FM’s Agnieszka Lichnerowicz and TVP’s Borys Czerniawski were held during a protest against the authoritarian rule of President Alexander Lukashenko, according to the website of prominent Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, owned by media group Agora, which also owns TOK FM.

"The journalists have been released. Our consul-general in Grodno just picked them up from the militia station there," the head of the ministry’s press office, Paulina Kapuscinska, told Reuters on Wednesday evening.

The brief arrest came a day after Gazeta Wyborcza’s Belarus correspondent Andrzej Poczobut went on trial in Grodno on charges of slandering and insulting Lukashenko.

Relations between Minsk and Warsaw deteriorated sharply late last year after a Belarussian police crackdown on a Dec. 19 opposition rally against a parliamentary election that handed Lukashenko a fourth term in power. Many leading opposition figures were rounded up.

Western governments, sharing the opposition’s view that the election was fraudulently conducted, applied sanctions against Lukashenko including a travel ban on him and leading associates.