BERLIN, May 27./TASS/. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Thursday that Athens had no evidence that intelligence officers could be on board the Ryanair flight, where Roman Protasevich, one of the co-founders of the Nexta Telegram channel, was among the passengers.
"As far as we know based on the work we have done, and of course we do work together with intelligence services - there is no evidence that there were agents on board," the prime minister said in an interview with the German Bild newspaper, published on Thursday.
Prime Minister Mitsotakis noted that he had "heard a lot of spy theories" concerning the Ryanair flight redirected to Minsk. "None of them has been confirmed. We have no evidence whatsoever that an agent was on board or that Protasevich was spied upon or persecuted," the prime minister repeated. "And we investigated this very thoroughly," he stressed.
However, he dubbed the forced landing of the passenger plane in Minsk as "an act of piracy committed with the assistance of the state". "The plane was redirected to Minsk for one and only one reason - to detain Protasevich," the prime minister noted. He said that at a session of the European Council, he had insisted on tighter sanctions against Belarusian authorities.
"One of the reasons was that the plane had taken off in Athens. There were Greek nationals on board, it was life-threatening," he explained. "We cannot accept such actions in Europe. Sanctions are painful, they involve not only individuals, but also companies and maybe economic sectors," he went on to say.
"I see as proportionate the decision to ban the landing of flights from Minsk and Belarus at European airports," Mitsotakis said.
Ryanair incident
On May 23, a Vilnius-bound Ryanair plane that took off from Athens made an emergency landing at Minsk International Airport after a reported bomb threat. A MiG-29 fighter was scrambled to escort the plane into Minsk. After the landing, the plane was inspected and no bomb was found inside. The Belarusian Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case into a false bomb alert. Among the passengers on the flight was Roman Protasevich, one of the co-founders of the Nexta Telegram channel, which Minsk recognizes as extremist. Protasevich was detained by law enforcement officials once the plane had landed in the Belarusian capital. On Sunday evening, the plane left Minsk airport and continued to Vilnius.
On Monday evening, an EU summit decreed to introduce new emergency sanctions against Belarus, demanded the release of Protasevich, and called upon the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to investigate the forced landing of the plane as a violation of the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation as well as safety risks for the plane’s crew and its passengers.