Tributes were paid to prominent opposition politician and former political prisoner Mikhail Marynich at Sunday’s memorial service in Minsk that was attended by scores of people.

Mr. Marynich, a former government minister and ambassador, died after an illness on October 17. He was 74.

The mourners included, among others, former presidential candidates Aliaksandr Kazulin and Uladzimir Niakliayeu; Stanislau Shushkevich, Belarus’ first formal head of state; journalists Iosif Siaredzich, Aliaksandr Tamkovich and Sviatlana Kalinkina; Uladzimir Matskevich, head of the Board of the International Consortium “EuroBelarus”; Christopher Panico, political and economic counselor at the US embassy; Maira Mora, head of the European Union’s delegation to Belarus; Uladzimir Yarmoshyn, Belarus’ prime minister in the late 1990s and early 2001; and Ivan Tsitsiankou, a former head of the Presidential Administration’s property management department, BelaPAN said.

Mr. Marynich was laid to rest at the Uschodnija cemetery in northeastern Minsk later on Sunday.

Born in the Homiel region, Mr. Marynich graduated from two universities and also finished the Communist Party Higher School in Minsk before his election to the Supreme Soviet of the Belarusan Soviet Socialist Republic in 1990.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Mr. Marynich served as Prague-based ambassador to the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, and Riga-based ambassador to Latvia, Estonia and Finland. In addition, he served as minister for external economic relations between 1994 and 1998.

The politician planned to run for president in 2001 but failed to gather the required number of ballot-access signatures.

In December 2004, Mr. Marynich was sentenced to five years in prison in a bizarre case in which he was found guilty of stealing computers from the US Embassy in Minsk, although the embassy had not reported any such theft. In 2005, Amnesty International declared Mr. Marynich a prisoner of conscience. He was released on parole in April 2006, more than one year after suffering a stroke behind the bars.