Four Belarusian officials have been charged by the U.S. with air piracy. They are accused of using a fake bomb threat to divert a Ryanair flight on May 23, 2021, in order to arrest opposition journalist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega.
According to the U.S. Justice Department, a life sentence would have been imposed on the four men had they been in the United States. The Federal Bureau of Investigation called the hijacking a “reckless violation of US law,” and earlier in the week the United Nations judged that the bomb threat was “deliberately false.” At the time Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary described the incident “state-sponsored hijacking.”
Charged quartet remains at large in Belarus
However, the Director General and Deputy Director General of Belarus’ State Air Navigation Authority, Leonid Churo and Oleg Kazyuchits remain at large in Belarus along with the two other accused.
The indictment accuses Kazyuchits of trying to cover up the involvement of state security officials and attempting to falsify the official incident record on the issuance of the hoax bomb threat, which was issued to the pilot once the Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius entered Belarusian air space. The pilot was then forced to make an emergency stop in Minsk.
Western sanctions
After this act of air piracy, the EU, US and UK imposed sanctions on Belarus. Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, whose victory at the August 2020 presidential election was disputed by mass rallies, claimed that the bomb threat was genuine.
Protasevich was freed from prison in June 2021 and has been under house arrest since then.
Lukashenko claimed victory in a widely discredited presidential election in 2020, sparking months of mass protests. He has since launched a brutal crackdown on dissenting voices who challenged his victory.
