OTTAWA, June 25. /TASS/. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Council will review the working document about the incident involving the Ryanair flight over Belarus on June 28 and not on June 25 as it was initially planned, Russia’s envoy to ICAO Sergei Gudkov told TASS on Thursday.
"It was just revealed that the ICAO Council postponed the consideration of the interim report from Friday to Monday," he said.
On Thursday, Gudkov told TASS that the ICAP Secretariat had published the working document about the Ryanair flight incident. He added that the document essentially does not have any preliminary conclusions, while the commission that was established still cannot begin its investigation as it is yet to receive all the necessary materials.
The Belarusian authorities informed on Thursday that they had been sent the interim report about the incident.
On May 23, a Vilnius-bound Ryanair flight that took off from Athens was forced to make an emergency landing in the Belarusian capital of Minsk after a reported bomb threat. A Mikoyan MiG-29 jet was scrambled to escort the plane into Minsk. The bomb threat came up empty after the aircraft had landed. The Belarusian authorities specified later that Roman Protasevich, wanted in Belarus as a co-founder of the Nexta Telegram channel, which the Belarusian authorities recognized as extremist, had been among the flight’s passengers. He was detained by Belarusian law enforcement agents. Following the incident, the European Union barred Belarusian air companies from operating flights to EU airports and using the European Union’s airspace, and recommended that European air carriers should avoid Belarusian airspace.