Poland wants 3 Belarusians behind bars for Ryanair forced landing
The Ryanair flight was forced to to land in Minsk, where opposition blogger Raman Pratasevich and his partner were arrested.
Prosecutors in Poland plan to press charges against three Belarusian suspects in the dramatic diversion of a Ryanair plane by the regime of dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko in 2021. The next step is requesting European arrest warrants.
The plane, registered in Poland, was forced to make an emergency landing in Minsk under claims that a bomb was on board.
“This resulted in the unlawful deprivation of liberty of 132 people and the detention of the Belarusian oppositionist Raman Pratasevich,” the prosecutors said in a statement Friday. Pratasevich’s then-partner, Sofia Sapiega, also was arrested in Minsk.
The three suspects are a former director of the Belarusian Air Navigation Agency; the head of the air traffic control shift at the time; and the head of Lukashenko’s secret service.
Once European-wide warrants are issued, Polish prosecutors will also ask Interpol to put out a so-called red notice.
By inventing a non-existent bomb threat as the plane crossed through Belarusian air space, the suspects conspired to force the pilots to land at a Minsk airport. the prosecutors said. “Witnesses testified that air traffic controllers were informed of the false bomb threat by their superiors,” the prosecutors revealed.
Lithuania called the incident an act of state terrorism and the democratic Belarusian opposition, largely concentrated in Vilnius, compared Lukashenko and his regime to “Somali pirates.”
Poland took up the case because Ryanair’s plane is registered there — through its Buzz subsidiary — and because several Polish citizens were on the flight.
Pratasevich was sentenced to eight years in prison last year, but he was pardoned soon after. But he’s not allowed to leave Belarus.
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