A 21st century hijacking
The lengths to which a dictatorship will go to capture its opponents; also, what happened to KFC?
When the government of Belarus, Vladmir Putin’s AAA affiliate, found out that a dissident journalist who’d fled the country would be on a flight passing through its air space, it couldn’t resist the opportunity to get him.
But how do you do that when the plane isn’t scheduled to land in Belarus? Simple: you fake a bomb threat, instruct the plane to divert to Minsk, and then get your man when he’s at the airport. And to make sure everything goes right, you have a KGB man - yes, Belarus still calls it that - in the control tower to make sure the hapless air traffic controller is in on the scheme, whether he wants to be or not.
He subsequently fled to Poland and spoke to investigators, and shared with them a surreptitious recording he’d made with his cell phone. Politico has posted an animated video featuring the audio:
It’s a poor-quality recording, as one might expect under the circumstances, but that kind of makes it more unnerving. I’m not an expert on how such bomb threats are normally handled by flight crew, but it certainly seems like the pilots were extremely suspicious before deciding it was better to be safe than sorry and landed in the Belarusian capital.
After everyone evacuated the plane (this is Ryanair, so presumably they had to pay an evacuation fee) the KGB got their man:
Once on the ground, it was clear this was no normal diversion.
Ryanair called Minsk authorities 12 times in a two-hour window before and after the plane landed to try to get more information about the threat, including asking for a copy of the email (which wasn’t provided).
Eventually, the authorities allowed the crew and passengers back aboard their airplane to continue the flight. But not everyone made it. Before takeoff, cabin crew conducted a headcount of passengers and found five were missing. But no explanation was provided to the Ryanair crew by the Minsk Airport ground staff, and the airplane took off leaving those five passengers behind. Among them were Belarusian journalist Protasevich and his Russian girlfriend.
The report doesn’t identify the other three passengers — other than to say that of the five, three were Belarusian, one was Russian and one was Greek — but Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary said in the immediate aftermath that he believed agents of the Belarusian KGB were traveling on the plane and were offloaded at the airport.
A year later, no one is landing in Minsk. Well, they still get flights from Russia and some other friendly or neutral countries, but EU sanctions ensured that whatever Western visitors they did get aren’t coming now.
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