Valery Fralow dies at 67

Valery Fralow, a prominent opposition figure and retired military general, has died a sudden death in Minsk at the age of 67.

His son, Dzmitry Fralow, found his father dead at his home on Monday.

“The exact cause of the death is unknown, but doctors said that he appeared to have died from a clot or heart failure,” Dzmitry Fralow told BelaPAN.

Born in Minsk on August 17, 1947, Valery Fralow graduated from the Kharkiv Guards Higher Tank Command School in 1970, the Malinovsky Military Armored Forces Academy in Moscow in 1977, the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR in 1991 and the Academy of Public Administration under the aegis of the President of the Republic of Belarus in 2000.

In October 1994, Alyaksandr Lukashenka appointed Mr. Fralow commander of the Hrodna-headquartered 28th Army Corps.

Mr. Fralow retired from military service in 2000 in the rank of general major.

He was a member of the House of Representatives of the National Assembly of Belarus between 2000 and 2004. He was a founder of the Respublika (Republic) dissident group in the House. Together with two other lawmakers, he staged a hunger strike in the summer of 2004, demanding the democratization of the Electoral Code.

In 2006, he withdrew from a presidential race after failing to collect the required 100,000 voter signatures and threw his support behind Alyaksandr Kazulin.

Earlier this year, Mr. Fralow told BelaPAN that he was planning to run in the 2015 presidential election. He said that he was in favor of the nomination of one contender to represent opposition forces in the race but doubted that they would manage to select such a contender.

Mr. Fralow was deputy chairman of the Hramada Belarusian Social Democratic Party.