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KGB releases Lithuanian police officer

Laimonas Bankauskas, chief of the Vilnius police department’s mounted police unit who was arrested last week in Belarus over a drug find, has been released, BelaPAN reports.

“The citizen of Lithuania, Laimonas Bankauskas, has been released from custody by an investigator of the local KGB office by consent of the prosecutor’s office of the Hrodna region under Part Four of the Criminal Procedure Code’s Article 119,” the KGB press office says in a statement posted on the KGB website on Wednesday night.

Mr. Bankauskas was arrested on August 16 in Ashmyany, a small Belarusian city near the Lithuanian border. As much as 45.5 grams of amphetamine was said to have been found inside his car during an examination at the Kamenny Loh checkpoint. He was placed in a pretrial detention center in Hrodna.

Mr. Bankauskas' relatives and Lithuanian law-enforcement officials insisted that the drug might have been planted in his car by KGB officers in an attempt to recruit him as an agent.

Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite called on the Belarusian authorities to ensure a "prompt and impartial" investigation of the case.