(by Mattia Bernardo Bagnoli) (ANSA) - MOSCOW, MAY 23 - A Ryanair airliner flying between Athens and Vilnius was forced to make an emergency landing, escorted by Belarusian military fighters, at the airport of the capital of Belarus, Minsk, where the police immediately arrested one of its passengers: the young Belarusian opponent Roman Protasevich, former director of the independent channel Nexta, voice of dissent to Alexander Lukashenko's regime.
The journalist, in fact, who in the recent past had documented the repression of the Belarusian police on opposition protesters, is on the regime's wanted list for "terrorism and extremism".
From what emerges from the first reconstructions, what has happened is in fact unprecedented and has all the air of being a grand operation of the KGB, the secret services of Minsk. Protasevich, according to Nexta, had previously suspected that he was being followed. Then, when the aircraft was now close to the borders with Lithuania (but in Belarusian airspace), the turmoil broke out.
The Minsk airport in fact stated that the plane landed after having launched a bomb alert and that the pilots themselves asked for the landing. A MiG-29 fighter of the Belarusian Air Force was taken off to escort the flight to Minsk. According to a Telegram channel believed to be close to Lukashenko, the Belarusian president "in person" would have given the order to land the plane in Minsk.
The plane is then taken off again for its destination.
The leader in exile of the Belarusian opposition, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, uttered words of fire: "The regime - he wrote on Twitter - forced the plane to land in Minsk to arrest the journalist and activist Raman Pratasevich. Cheora risks the death penalty. The episode was strongly condemned by the presidents of the EU Parliament, David Sassoli, the Ursula von der Leyen Commission, the Charles-Michel Council and the EU High Representative Josep Borrell. the Foreign Minister, Luigi di Maio, who expressed "firm condemnation" (ANSA).
