Thursday, December 9th, 2021
On flight from Protassevich
KGB officer forced landing in Minsk
The forced landing of a Ryanair plane at the end of May escalated the conflict between Belarus and the EU. The Belarusian opposition leader Protassevich was also on board. Investigations now shed light on how a KGB officer lied to the pilots.
When the Ryanair plane was forced to land with the Belarusian blogger Roman Protassewitsch on board, an officer of the KGB secret service is said to have been in command in the tower of Minsk airport. “He gave instructions to the staff who were in contact with the pilot,” said a report by the Polish secret service ABW and the public prosecutor’s office.
The investigations had also shown that, contrary to the information provided by the tower to the pilot, there was no bomb threat against the aircraft. In the conversation between the crew and the air traffic controllers, there was talk of the bomb threat before an e-mail was even received. According to the information, the investigators draw their findings from surveys of passengers, representatives of the airline as well as from examinations of the machine and analyzes of the recorded conversations.
The Ryanair machine is registered in Poland. Therefore, the country had launched an investigation. At the end of May, the Belarusian authorities forced a Ryanair passenger plane to make a stopover in Minsk on its way from Athens to Vilnius with a fighter jet. The forced landing was justified with a bomb threat.
The blogger Roman Protassewitsch, co-founder of the opposition Telegram channel Nexta, and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega were also on board. Both were arrested after landing. The EU, Great Britain and the USA then again imposed sanctions on the former Soviet republic. In June Protassevich and Sapega were released from prison and placed under house arrest.