Belarusian KGB was behind forced landing of Ryanair jet

THE Belarusian KGB burst into a control tower and ordered staff to ground a Ryanair flight with a dissident journalist on board, according to a report by the UN’S aviation agency.

The report, based on whistleblower evidence, accuses Belarus’s intelligence agency of faking a bomb threat on May 23 last year and forcing the Ryanair jet to divert from Vilnius to Minsk, where a prominent dissident journalist was taken off the flight and arrested.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO,) in its official report on the incident, cited conversations inside Minsk airport’s flight control tower and in the office of an airport official recorded by a flight controller.

The recordings appear to show that Belarusian officials faked a bomb threat in order to force-land the flight from Athens and arrest Roman Protasevich.

“As neither a bomb nor evidence of its existence was found during predeparture screening in Athens, Greece, and after various searches of the aircraft in Belarus and Lithuania, it is considered that the bomb threat was deliberately false,” the ICAO said in the report that listed several articles of the international aviation convention that Belarusian authorities had breached.

Several states are pursuing their own investigations and are trying to establish jurisdiction to deal with the matter through the courts.

Belarus has insisted that the bomb threat was genuine and that the Minsk airport control centre had no ulterior motives in forcing the jet to land there.

The report draws most of its evidence from the testimony of a flight controller who was ordered by his superiors and the suspected KGB agent to tell the Ryanair flight about the bomb threat in order to make it land in Minsk.

The flight controller, identified by Belarusian media as Oleg Galegov, did not show up for work a few months after the incident then surfaced abroad later. The ICAO said it interviewed the man with the assistance of US authorities.

Mr Protasevich has been under house arrest since he publicly repented his opposition to the Lukashenko regime in June last year.