On May 23 2021 anonymous emails were sent to several airports warning that a Ryanair passenger plane on its way from Athens to Vilnius had a bomb on board.
The plane was crossing the airspace of Belarus when it was informed of the bomb threat by the Belarusian air controller. The air controller recommended to land the plane in Minsk. After some back and force to gain more information the pilot declared an emergency and decided to land in Minsk.
After the plane had landed the passengers de-boarded, were searched and went into the airport building and through passport control. Two of them, Roman Protasevich and his girl friend Sofia Sapega, had outstanding arrest warrants against them. They were part of a group which had previously attempted to launch a color revolution in Minsk. The two were arrested.
The plane and all luggage was searched but no bomb was found. The passengers, except the two arrested and three who had Minsk as their final destination, boarded again and safely reached their destination.
The case led to accusations that the Belarusian security forces had created the threat against the plane and had forced it to land for the purposes of arresting the two people. There is however no evidence for that. Despite that several countries sanctioned Belarus and its national air carrier Belavia.
Belarus had asked the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to investigate the Ryanair incident. A preliminary report is now out and discussed below.
Moon of Alabama had followed the case in detail (The June 2 piece is probably the best one to catch up with the case):
- Lukashenko's Revenge (Served Cold) – May 24 2021
- Roman Protasevich – Arrested In Belarus – Is A Western Government Financed Neo-Nazi – May 26 2021
- By The Book – What Really Happened With The Ryanair Flight In Belarus – May 27 2021
- Ryanair Incident – Email Warning Received Before Plane Entered Belorussian Airspace – May 28 2021
- How ProtonMail Lost The Public Trust It Needs To Do Business – May 29 2021
- 'Like An Amoral Infant' – How ProtonMail Contributes To False Media Claims About Belarus – May 30
- Ryanair Bomb Threat In Belarus – 'Western' Media Narrative Disagrees With The Facts – May 31
- Timeline, Narrative Control And Consequences Of The Ryanair Incident In Belarus – June 2
- Roman Protasevich, Casualty Of The Ryanair Incident In Belarus, Is Spilling The Beans – June 4
- Putin Teaching A Journalist And Other New Bits Around Ryanair Flight 4978 – June 15
- U.S., UK Information Warfare Behind Regime Change Drive In Belarus by Kit Klarenberg – June 15
The ICAO report was recently finished and given to all members. Politico.eu had gained access to it and published it. The official results will be discussed with ICAO members at the end of this months.
The president of Belarus Aleksandr Lukashenko seems to be happy about the report:
According to the head of state, the ICAO admitted that there was no interception, forced landing or rerouting of Ryanair aircraft by Belarus. The president called the ICAO investigators heroic people: “They deserve some praise. Despite all the pressure (this is a UN organization and you know that we are on our own there) they had to admit that Lukashenko did not open fire at the aircraft, did not scramble a MiG fighter jet to force it to land. They are heroes by just stating these facts.”
According to Aleksandr Lukashenko, this fact itself is already important for Belarus. The country does not expect anything more from the investigation for the time being. "If they are willing to prove otherwise, then they should present evidence. There is no evidence, and we see this. Now all ICAO member countries see this. You know who's calling the shots there. The best thing for them is to soft-pedal this thing, not to go any farther. Because the farther it goes, the messier it gets. Therefore, they'd better not do it. Nothing good will come out of this," the head of state emphasized.
Most important is that the false claim about a military fighter jet making the Ryanair plane land has been fully debunked:
When commenting on the report, Director of the Aviation Department of the Belarusian Transport and Communications Ministry Artyom Sikorsky said that the fact-finding team admitted the evidence proving that Belarus did not intercept, force to land or reroute the flight by using a MiG-29 military jet. The ICAO fact-finding team noted that there were no visual signals from the flight and cabin crew and that there was no communication with the aircraft. This is the proof that there was no interception by the MiG-29.
According to him, the document emphasizes another important point which Belarus previously drew attention to. “The data of the aircraft crew conversations in the cockpit was not saved as the crew did not turn off the recorders after landing in Minsk. Thus, the crew did not save the data, including the moment when they were making the decision to land in Minsk. It looks strange,” Artyom Sikorsky stressed.
The opposition news site belsat.eu mentions the report but has obviously not read it as it still claims that the plane was 'forced to land'.
I have read the report and can confirm that it makes no claims against Belarus and also leaves no basis for such claims.
But I also found some curiosities in it.
The report says that the pilot did not contact his airline before making the decision to land in Minsk. This is contradicted by the transcript of the radio traffic between the pilot and the Air Traffic Controller:
Pilot: 09:34:49: Radar, RYR 1TZ.
ATC: RYR 1TZ.
Pilot: Could you give us frequency for (unreadable) company so that we would be able to (unreadable).
ATC: RYR 1TZ say again what frequency do you need.
Pilot: We just need to quawk with the operation of the company, if there any frequency for that (unreadable).
ATC. Do you need RYR operation frequency?
Pilot: That is correct 1TZ.
ATC: Standby please.
…
Pilot: 09:39:30: RYR 1TZ Any adverts?
ATC: RYR 1TZ Standby, waiting for the information.
…
ATC: 09.42.49: RYR 1TZ we have ground stuff frequency for Vilnius 131.750
Pilot: 131.75 and we have contact…(unreadable).
It is also contradicted by a report from the Lithuanian police:
Those questioned include the captain of the aircraft who "made the decision [to change course to Minsk] after consulting Ryanair's management", according to [Rolandas Kiškis, head of the Criminal Police Bureau].
There was a lot of confusion about the time when the bomb threat email had arrived at Minsk airport. Belarus says it received two emails about half an hour apart.
A shady organization in London, financed by the former Russian oligarch and tax evader Mikhail Khodorkovski, had claimed that Minsk had only received the second email which arrived after the plane was diverted. It claims that Belarus must therefore have faked the bomb threat. This seems to be supported by Protonmail, a Swiss provider for anonymous email services, through which the threat emails were sent. But my discussion with Protonmail lets me doubt that the claims as made are truthful.
ICAO had asked Belarus about metadata that could have proven that the first email arrived in Minsk at the time Minsk claims it arrived. However the old log files of the receiving mail server had long been overwritten by routine procedures. (Such routines are very common for such servers. I have programmed a number of these.) The only things Minsk could show to ICAO were screenshots of both threat emails it had received.
ICAO has however never talked with Protonmail or checked their log-files. It only refers to claims from Protonmail that it had received through the government of Lithuania which had received it through officials in Switzerland. Lithuania is not a friend of Belarus but supports the opposition. The ICAO should have gone to the original source. The current situation leaves a claim by Belarus plus screenshot plus action taken by it against claims by a Protonmail executive, the Lithuanian government and Khodorkovski shady outlet.
Is this left so to muddle the case?
ICAO also questions why it has taken so long to submit details of the threat email to the pilot. However its own report explains that the threat email was first discovered by a system administrator who had logged into the mail server from his home and informed his superior by mobile phone. That superior then informed air traffic control likewise by phone. As far as is known the ATC never saw the email and its content was provided via a phone chain. In general the information flow between authorities in Minsk and elsewhere was not optimal.
ICAO notes that the Air Traffic Controller who had talked with the Ryanair plane has vanished and could not be questioned.
The New York Times reported on December 8 2021 that the air traffic controller in question was from Georgia (the country) and had 'defected' to Poland during the summer:
Asked about the defection, Stanislaw Zaryn, director of Poland’s Department of National Security, declined to comment on specifics but said that Polish officials investigating what he described as the Ryanair “hijacking” had managed “to obtain an account of a direct witness of the actions taken at the control tower in Minsk.”
He added that, according to the witness, an officer of Belarus’s intelligence and security agency, the K.G.B., was in the control tower at the time and “at a crucial moment took control of the air traffic controller.” Throughout the incident, the Belarusian officer “maintained ongoing telephone contact with someone to whom he reported on what was currently happening with the plane,” Mr. Zaryn said.
Poland is housing several of the Belarusian opposition groups including the NEXTA channel, the outlet that directed the color revolution attempt in Belarus and recently tried the same in Kasakhstan. There is no reason to trust Poland's Department of National Security which cooperates with and finances them.
Especially not when the 'defection' was made for probably financial reasons and/or to gain a U.S. visa:
Nasha Niva, an independent news outlet whose website has been blocked by the Belarusian authorities, reported on its Telegram channel in July that Mr. Galegov had gone on vacation in June and had not been seen since. It quoted a colleague as saying that he had taken a holiday in his home country, Georgia.
Ivan Gerlovsky, deputy general director at Belaeronavigatsiya, a state company that manages air traffic control in Belarus, told the outlet that the personnel department had called Mr. Galegov’s mother-in-law in Minsk without success and was trying to establish where he was.
Belarus’s security agency, called the K.G.B., as it was when the country was part of the Soviet Union, in August signed a cooperation agreement with the security service of Georgia, another former Soviet republic — which would probably have raised the risks for Mr. Galegov if he had been in Georgia. By then, however, he had arrived in Poland. He has since left, one of the European security officials said. His current whereabouts was unclear.
Since disappearing over the summer, the air traffic controller has deleted all his social media accounts.
With a view to defection, he initially contacted the U.S. embassy in Warsaw but was steered by the Americans toward the Polish authorities, the European security officials said. The U.S. embassy in Warsaw declined to comment.
The man has since vanished without leaving a trace. But wait, says the Times, there is even more secret service nonsense:
Suspicions that Belarusian security services had orchestrated the hoax were strengthened by the previously unreported findings of a separate investigation by the police and the prosecutor general’s office in Lithuania. Their inquiries found that a passenger who disembarked after the plane landed in Minsk was a Belarusian man believed to have been recruited by his country’s military intelligence service.
That man, identified as Siarhei Kulakou by Lithuanian investigators, arrived in Vilnius a day before Mr. Protasevich took an outbound flight to Athens for a vacation, and then joined the dissident on the return flight to Vilnius a week later.
To this circumstantial evidence of a secret operation by Mr. Lukashenko’s security services, however, has now been added the testimony of the defector and recordings he bought with him to Poland that establish how the operation went down in the Minsk control tower, the security officials said.
Circumstantial evidence and a witness that has vanished are not a sound foundation for making a convincing case.
The NYT then repeats the false claim that Roman Protasevich was immediately arrested after the plane landed:
As soon as the plane landed, Belarusian security agents grabbed Mr. Protasevich and Ms. Sapega. Since then, the two have been seen only at a news briefing staged by the Belarusian authorities in June and in government-issued videos in which they confessed, apparently under duress, to organizing “mass unrest.”
An opposition Russian news outlet, Dozhd, reported on Sunday that Belarus had filed formal criminal charges against Ms. Sapega that mean she could face at least six years in prison.
Mr. Protasevich’s whereabouts and fate are not known.
The TV documentation (scroll down) made about the case includes the CCTV footage from the airport which proves that Protasevich and Sapega were arrested during the passport check.
Protasevich, who has since spilled the beans about the opposition, is alive and well and on January 18 was active on Twitter:
Well, friends. I decided to slowly return to Twitter after a long break. For a long time, as you noticed, I didn't write anything. And this was due to the fact that I was moving away from news, negativity and information noise. And it helped 🙂
And, in fact, it's a very cool feeling. When, after a long stay (the last couple of years) in the information field (both in tvi and in TG), which is completely saturated with negativity, you return to normal emotions and normal life – the difference becomes noticeable.
Well, in the near future in my life there will be some changes, which I will definitely talk about here. In the meantime, write your assumptions in the comments under this post – let's see which of you is closest to the truth 🙂
His most recent tweet is this one:
bigger
I have so far seen no deeper 'western' reports about the ICAO report. That may well be because it does not support the 'western' narrative that it was Belarus which forced the plane down.
A sign for that the report is not welcome is the diversion the U.S. created on December 20 just as the ICAO report was send to all its member states:
Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment Thursday against several Belarusian government officials for allegedly plotting to divert a Lithuania-bound aircraft to a Minsk airport so a dissident and his girlfriend could be arrested there.
The international episode that has resulted in an air piracy case was centered on a plan by the officials to report a fake bomb threat to apprehend anti-government media personality Roman Protasevich by forcing his flight to make an emergency landing at an airport within Belarus’s jurisdiction on May 23.
…
“Not only is what took place a reckless violation of U.S. law, it’s extremely dangerous to the safety of everyone who flies in an airplane,” Assistant Director Michael J. Driscoll of the FBI’s New York Field Office said in a statement. “The next pilot who gets a distress call from a tower may doubt the authenticity of the emergency — which puts lives at risk.”
Why the U.S. claims to have jurisdiction in the case is beyond me. How it ever wants to prove its accusation is likewise unexplainable.
While the ICAO report leaves a few issues open it does not provide any evidence that Belarus created the bomb threat or has otherwise acted in bad faith.