BELGRADE, April 8. /TASS/. Serbia will send official requests to Russia and NATO over an incident in which a fighter jet, presumably a NATO one, used a civilian plane of Air Serbia to enter the Russian airspace, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic told the national television.
"Tomorrow, the country will request additional information from Russians, but we will seek information from NATO as well. We’ll see, who is being smart enough to create civil aviation hazards with its fighter jets. Maybe it was an accident, it would be good to hear that. We have exact coordinates of where this plane emerged," he said.
The Serbian leader read out a report by a Serbian pilot of the Moscow-Belgrade flight, saying that a fighter jet, presumably of a NATO country, was flying under the civilian plane’s belly.
"Near the Russian-Latvian border, Russian traffic controllers warned us about an unknown military plane moving around our plane, and asked us to carry out visual identification of it, and submit the data to them. It was either a Phantom Fighter F-15 or Eurofighter jet of grey color. Evidently, a NATO plane was in the Russian airspace, flying just one kilometer below," the pilot’s report says.
On Tuesday, passengers and staff were evacuated from the Nikola Tesla Airport in Belgrade. Prior to that, a series of false bomb alarms aboard Belgrade-Moscow and Belgrade-St. Petersburg flights was received by Air Serbia. The planes had to return to their airport of departure for a check. Messages with threats were coming from the territory of Ukraine and Poland.
On March 28, a bomb alert was received by a Belgrade-St. Petersburg flight, prompting Hungary to scramble its Gripen fighter jets and escort the plane in the Hungarian airspace.