U.S. prosecutors charged four Belarusian government officials on Thursday with aircraft piracy for diverting a Ryanair flight with a fake bomb threat last year in order to arrest an opposition journalist.
The charges, announced by federal prosecutors in New York, recounted how a regularly-scheduled passenger plane traveling between Athens, Greece and Vilnius, Lithuania on May 23, 2021 was diverted to Minsk, Belarus by air traffic control authorities in Belarus.
“Since the dawn of powered flight, countries around the world have cooperated to keep passenger airplanes safe. The defendants shattered those standards by diverting an airplane to further the improper purpose of repressing
