Raman Pratasevich is a critic of president Alexander Lukashenko and had covered protests last year against the strongman's brutal suppression.
Journalist Raman Pratasevich was asked just one question when a Belarusian official pulled him out of a crowd of passengers on a bus after a military plane forced their flight to Minsk.
"Asks one policeman pointing at him: do you speak Russian?" remember Saulius Danauskas, who was on a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius that was captured 10 minutes before it arrived in Lithuania. “They did a great show. But it was clear that the job was following the same man. ”
The grandfather, returning from a holiday in Greece with his wife and daughter's family, was one of the 171 passengers and crew members who experienced a two-hour trip that turned out to be a nightmare as the Boeing 737-800 arrived in Minsk. At the bottom they are tested for safety which includes sniffing dogs, including infants.
In Danauskas it was clear that all emergencies were planned and there was no bomb threat, which is what the passengers told the frightened passengers. Most of the people on board were Lithuanian people like him and Russian-speaking people who had given them the past during Soviet rule.
The real culprit was Pratasevich, a 26-year-old critic of Belarus' President Alexander Lukashenko who had covered up last year's protests against the brutal oppression of the powerful man. He had been living in Vilnius since November, when he was listed as a wanted terrorist in Belarus, and Lithuania allowed him to stay in the country.
When Belarus security officials released Pratatvich on Sunday, he appeared calmly leaving his post.
He was soon dragged away, and he did not reach his destination. Pratasevich's girlfriend was searched and allowed to return to the plane, but she stayed in Minsk. At least four other people also did not return to the board, according to Lithuanian government officials.
"When the pilot announced that we were arriving in Minsk, he became very worried, tried to pull out his computer and said it all happened to him," said Monika Simkiene, 40, who was traveling with three children. "He just turned to other passengers and spoke to him and said he was facing the death penalty."
Unusual measures taken to protect him were hijacking a commercial aircraft and violating the air traffic control code. It has caught Westerners unknowingly and is rushing to get an adequate response beyond words of suspicion. How much of this has been done with the knowledge or permission of Russian President Vladimir Putin is one of the many unanswered questions.
‘Old Soviet Way’
Belarusian officials said they had forced the plane to land because of a suspected bomb threat, adding that it later turned out to be a lie. Despite the danger, however, passengers interviewed by Bloomberg said there was no emergency between 50 to 60 police officers present at the airport to conduct checks.
"It all happened in the old Soviet way," Danauskas said. “Missing or non-existent, Covid or Covid missing - no one cared. It was not fun at all. ”
The search lasted two and a half hours, during which time they were not given water, or allowed to take bath breaks or make phone calls. Simkiene, his younger brother in a wheelchair, sadly remarked that those difficulties "are nothing compared to what you expect" a detained journalist.
The game has opened the eyes of Arthur Six, 25, a French citizen working on the Euronext exchange and one of nine French passengers on board. "I was unaware of the situation in the country after the Soviet break," he said. "Now I have learned that this is a dictatorship."
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