The Ministry of Information said in a statement that it had issued a formal warning to the Nasha Niva and Narodnaya Volya dailies that their reports on Monday’s bombing had hurt public interests and discredited authorities.

The reprimands have fueled concerns that authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko’s government was using the bombing as a pretext to uproot the last vestiges of political pluralism in the ex-Soviet nation.

Lukashenko already has ordered prosecutors to interrogate opposition activists over the bombing, and the prosecutor general has threatened to “bring order” to the Internet, the last outpost of free speech in Belarus.

Authorities have arrested five suspects in Monday’s blast, including a man in his mid-20s accused of placing the bomb on the platform of Minsk’s busiest subway station. Investigators haven’t said yet who ordered the bombing. Each of the two newspapers had received official rebukes for their past reporting. Under the Belarusian law, two such reprimands are enough for authorities to go to court to seek a media outlet’s closure.

“Authorities are using the terror attack to make a shot of fear to the society and the media,” said Andrei Skurko, the editor of Nasha Niva.