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European leaders have immediately called for an international response after Belarus forced a Ryanair flight to Minsk to land in Lithuania on Sunday after Ryanair was forced to land and one of its passengers was arrested after leading opposition activists.
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, leader of the exiled opposition in Belarus, said the activist of the Roman Protasevich line, who lives in Lithuania, has been arrested in the Belarusian capital.
“From now on – no one flying over Belarus can be safe,” he wrote on Twitter after Ryanair’s FR4978 flight from Athens to Vilnius accidentally diverted to Minsk.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote on Twitter that the forced landing was “completely unacceptable” and called on Belarus to allow all passengers to travel safely to Vilnius. “Violations of international air transport rules must have consequences,” he wrote.
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda has called for the quick release of Protasevich and said he will raise the issue at an EU summit on Monday. “I call on NATO and EU allies to react immediately to the threat posed by the Belarusian regime to international civilian aircraft,” Nauseda said in a statement on his website.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote on Twitter that he would demand “immediate sanctions” against Belarus. “The hijacking of a civilian plane is an unprecedented act of state terrorism. It cannot be left unpunished, ”Morawiecki wrote.
Protasevich, 26, tried to cover up and direct huge protests against Lukashenko last year when Nexta, Warsaw’s main media group, was targeted.
Belarusian President Alexander gave an “irreversible order to turn the plane over and land” before he personally left the Belarusian airspace, according to a semi-official channel of the presidency of the Telegram messaging application.
Belarusian security forces did not immediately confirm whether Protasevich was arrested.
Ryanair flight to Minsk International Airport on Sunday © via AFP Getty Images
In November, Belarus put Protasevich on the terrorist list and charged him with three crimes related to the protests, the most serious of which calls for a 15-year prison sentence.
The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Protasevich had been “arrested by the Minsk regime.”
Ryanair said the flight crew “reported Belarus [air traffic control] There was a potential security threat and they were ordered to divert to the nearest airport, Minsk. ”
“Nothing inappropriate was found and the authorities cleared the plane to go along with the passengers and crew after being on the ground in Minsk for about five hours,” it says in a statement. The company “reported to national and European security and safety agencies”.
According to messages sent by Protasevich to his colleagues, he noticed that he was being followed by a KGB agent who suspected he was in the room leaving Athens. The man was in the queue behind him and tried to take a picture of his documents, the activist wrote to his colleagues in text messages. Protasevich said the man then asked him a “stupid question” in Russian and walked away. The plane rotated near the Lithuanian border and landed in Minsk, according to flight tracking data.
Andrei Gurtsevich, the commander-in-chief of the air force, said that Belarus had decided to deal with the MiG-29 aircraft after learning of a bomb threat, “Belta was told by the state news agency. Airport officials later said the bomb threat was “fake.”
Next has angered Lukashenko over coverage of last year’s protests and the violent repression released by the Lukashenko regime in response. The channel in Telegram has more than 1.2 million subscribers, a huge audience in a country of just 9.5 million people.
Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets in an unprecedented display of grief as the former leader of the collective farm that ruled Belarus for 27 years with an iron fist won victory over Tsikhanouskaya last year in a very flawed presidential election.
Most of the opposition characters are in exile, such as Tsikhanouskaya, who lives in Lithuania, or in prison.
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