Belarusian opposition activist Vasil Verameichuk has been detained in Vietnam and extradited to Belarus, where he faces accusations of terrorism and a possible death penalty, the opposition in exile said Thursday.

On Wednesday, state television in Belarus showed Verameichuk being taken to Minsk on a nearly empty plane and led down the steps by two security officers, then taken away in a van. In the same video, Konstantin Bychek, head of the investigative department of the State Security Committee of Belarus, said Verameichuk’s case was a warning to people he called extremists and terrorists, adding that “Belarusian justice will overtake them anywhere on earth.”

Franak Viachorka, a senior aide to Tatsiana Tsikhanouskaya, leader of the Belarusian opposition, told Reuters that Verameichuk faces a sentence of 20 years in prison or the death penalty on terrorism charges.

Vasіl Verameichuk is a citizen of Belarus, an opposition activist, and an elected member of the Belarusian parliament in exile. He participated in the mass protests in 2020 against Belarusian President Lukashenko that followed the elections, which the opposition and the West called fraudulent. He was arrested for ten days in 2020 on suspicion of setting fire to the cars of the prosecutor’s office, which was one of the alleged main organizers of mass repression. In 2021, due to the threat of re-arrest, he emigrated to Ukraine.

Vasil is also a former member of Kalinowski’s regiment, a Belarusian volunteer force that fought for Ukraine in the war against Russia, which Belarus declared a terrorist organization earlier this year. He reportedly left the group, because of a conflict with his regiment’s headquarters, which “was an office that was making money from the war and had no real relation to the fighting.” It is believed that it was the headquarters that banned Vasyl from entering Ukraine after he went abroad in 2022, even though he had received an invitation from another brigade.

Belarus has faced many human rights restrictions in recent years. The rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly, inter alia, remain severely restricted. The justice system is criticized as suppressing dissent while the death penalties continue to be imposed. According to local human rights group Viasna, 1274 people are jailed in Belarus on politically related charges as of today.