Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko said he acted “legally” in deciding to divert a passenger plane to Minsk after receiving a bomb threat and denied that he had ordered a forced landing to arrest a dissident.
“I acted legally to protect people,” he said, according to the official Belta agency.
Lukashenko said the charge that he sent a MiG-29 fighter to force Ryanair’s flight to land is an “absolute lie”.
The Lukashenko regime is accused of diverting a flight that traveled the Athens-Vilnius route to Minsk on Sunday for an alleged bomb threat, which turned out to be false, to detain the opposing journalist Roman Protasevich and his companion, the Russian Sofia Sapega.
The Ministry of Transport published yesterday the transcript of the dialogue between the pilot and the air traffic controller. The latter reports that “there is a bomb on board” and “recommends” landing in Minsk.
On Monday (24), the Air Force, which sent a MiG-29 fighter to intercept the flight, said the airport was chosen by the Ryanair pilot.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the Belarusian version “unreliable”, which cited a bomb threat attributed to the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also called for the journalist’s release.
Protasevich, 26, was editor in chief of the influential opposition media Nexta, who coordinated the mobilization of Belarusians during the 2020 protests against Lukashenko’s controversial reelection.
The Minsk regime accuses him of being involved in “terrorist activities”. Belarusian television showed on Monday (24) a video of the young man, recorded in a prison in the capital, according to the broadcaster, in which he confesses to having organized “disturbances”.
Belarusian authorities often release confessions of regime dissidents recorded under duress, as Svetlana Tikhanovskaya did before her exile in Vilnius last year.
* With information from the AFP agency.
