Dissidents arrested in Belarus after switching to Ryanair flights

The opposition said that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko forced a Ryanair flight to Lithuania to land in Minsk on Sunday in order to arrest a top dissident, which triggered a strong reaction from Brussels and European capitals.

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, an opposition leader in exile in Belarus, said that Roman Protasevich, an online activist living in Lithuania, has been detained in the Belarusian capital and demanded an immediate international response.

After Ryanair’s FR4978 flight from Athens to Vilnius was accidentally transferred to Minsk, she wrote on Twitter: “From now on-no one can fly over Belarus -“.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a tweet that forced landings were “completely unacceptable” and called on Belarus to let all passengers go to Vilnius safely. She wrote: “Any violation of international air transport rules must bear the consequences.”

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda called on Protasevich to be released quickly and stated that he would raise the matter at the EU summit on Monday. Nauseda said in a statement on its website: “I call on NATO and the EU allies to immediately respond to the threat posed by the Belarusian regime to international civil aviation.”

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki tweeted that he called for “immediate sanctions” of Belarus. “The hijacking of civilian aircraft is an unprecedented act of state terrorism. It cannot go unpunished,” Morawiecki wrote.

Protasevich, 26, is the former editor of the Warsaw-based media group Nexta, which played an important role in reporting and guiding the large-scale protests against Lukashenko last year. effect.

A post on the semi-official presidential channel by messaging app Telegram stated that Lukashenko personally ordered the “turn the plane around and land before it landed in Belarusian airspace.”

The Belarusian security forces did not immediately confirm whether Protasevich had been arrested.

In November last year, Belarus put Protasevich on the terrorist watch list and charged him with 3 crimes related to protests, with the most serious sentence of up to 15 years in prison.

The Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that Protasevich has been “detained by the Minsk regime.” Ryanair did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to a message sent by Protasevich to his colleague, he noticed that he was being followed by a man suspected to be a Belarusian KGB agent when he was leaving the lounge in Athens. The activist wrote in a text message to a colleague that the man was standing behind the boarding queue, trying to take a photo of his ID. Protasevich said that the man then asked him a “stupid question” in Russian and left.

After the plane entered Belarusian airspace, a Lithuanian airport official told the local site Delphi that there was a “clash” between the passengers and the crew. According to flight tracking data, the plane turned around and landed in Minsk near the Lithuanian border.

Senior Air Force Commander Andrei Gurtsevich said that after learning of the bomb threat, Belarus decided to accompany a MiG-29 fighter jet. Airport officials later stated that the bomb threat was “false.”

Nextida angered Lukashenko because it reported on the protests last year and the brutal suppression launched by the Lukashenko regime. Its channel on the messaging app Telegram has more than 1.2 million subscribers and a huge audience in a country of only 9.5 million.

After the former collective farm owner who ruled Belarus with an iron fist for 27 years claimed that he defeated Tsikhanouskaya in a severely flawed presidential election last year, thousands of Belarusians took to the streets with unprecedented dissatisfaction.

Most of the main figures in the opposition are either in exile like Tsikhanouskaya in Lithuania or in prison.

Other reports by Richard Milne in Oslo.