Morales’ jet delay leads to uproar

South American leaders voiced anger yesterday after the President of Bolivia was treated like a fugitive after rumours that his personal jet was carrying the whistleblower Edward Snowden into asylum.

Evo Morales’ flight back to La Paz from a Moscow conference took a day longer than expected when Portugal, France, Italy and Spain refused permission for his jet to fly through their airspace and he was forced to make an unscheduled overnight stop in Vienna.

Morales was eventually able to leave Austria after his plane was searched, but the incident prompted Bolivia’s neighbours to call an emergency meeting last night to decide how to defend ‘‘the dignity of Latin America’’.

Bolivia’s vice-president said Morales was ‘‘kidnapped by imperialism’’, while the country’s ambassador to the United Nations complained and called it an act of aggression that violated the principle of diplomatic immunity.

Austrian police found no trace of Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor last seen at Moscow airport. The mistake Morales made seems to have been to suggest at a Moscow press conference in Moscow that his country would be willing to consider asylum for Snowden.

‘‘I am not a criminal,’’ Morales insisted at a midnight press conference at Vienna airport, as Austrian officials checked the passports of everyone on board his jet. In the morning there was a tense meeting between Morales and the Spanish Ambassador, who was said to have demanded that Spanish officials should also be allowed to search the plane if it wanted to refuel in the Canary Islands.

Alvaro Garcia, Bolivia’s vicepresident, said that as well as the complaint at the UN another would be lodged with the UN Human Rights Commission against several European countries for closing their airspace at short notice. ‘‘As a Government, we are filing complaints worldwide,’’ Garcia said.

Cristina Kirchner, the Argentine president, called the incident ‘‘very humiliating’’. In a series of tweets, she added: ‘‘They are definitely all crazy. The head of state and his plane have total immunity.’’

Kirchner said she had spoken to Uruguayan President Jose Mujica, who was equally outraged. Jose Miguel Insulza, head of the Organisation of American States, said: ‘‘Nothing justifies such a disrespectful act toward a country’s highest authority.’’