“Dear Mr. Sciacchitano,
In this letter I would like to refer to the incident involving Ryanair Flight 4978 from Athens to Vilnius which saw the aircraft forced to make an emergency landing in Minsk on May 23, 2021. The premise for the diversion was the claim by Belarusian authorities that there was a bomb onboard the plane. Upon landing, the alleged bomb was not found but the authorities arrested two passengers – Raman Pratasevich, an independent journalist, and Sofia Sapega, his girlfriend. Both are subjects of criminal cases in Belarus.
It has become known that the ICAO Council will hold a debate on January 31, 2022, on the findings of the report prepared by the Fact-Finding Investigation Team commissioned by the ICAO Council. I would like to present the perspective of the Belarusian people on this incident and suggest steps following this debate.
In the beginning, I would like to bring your attention to the internal situation in Belarus which led to the authorities’ decision to force the landing of Flight 4978. Since 1994, the Belarusian regime has been headed by Alyaksandr Lukashenka. In August 2020, he ran for office for the sixth time and lost the presidential election and then used his power to blatantly falsify them in his favor. Mass peaceful protests were met with violence by the regime. From that time, he has kept power by brutal force and repression in an environment of outright lawlessness.
The situation of utter disregard for human lives and disrespect for rules that was experienced by the crew and the passengers onboard Flight 4978 was shocking to the world. But to Belarusians, such disdain was not surprising. We have been subjected to this treatment before, during, and after the incident and on a national scale. To Belarusians, the Ryanair incident was not an accident. It was a deliberate, pre-planned, cool-headed operation to arrest an opponent of the regime as it struggled to re-establish control over the country by force.
Importantly, the regime has never tried to critically assess this event, comfort passengers, or apologize for the stress and inconvenience to the Ryanair crew and company. Faced with a barrage of criticism, it never tried to analyze systemic inconsistencies and come up with improvements to prevent similar situations in the future. On the contrary, from the beginning officials chose to present a false narrative, attempted to distract and divert attention from the regime’s responsibility, smeared the pilots of Flight 4978, and ridiculed the response from the international community.
Failure to hold the Lukashenka regime accountable for such an obvious crime in the international dimension will have catastrophic consequences not only for the Belarusian people when Lukashenka will feel even more unrestrained in his unchecked rule but for the entire civil aviation industry. This incident must not become a precedent to be used by other regimes and political forces to forcibly divert other flights for political reasons. It must not reflect detrimentally on the core interests of the safety of the passengers and crew. This case at its fundamental premise corrodes the trust that must exist between the pilots and the air traffic controllers. This trust must be protected from manipulations and abuse — exactly the problems that occurred during the hijacking of Flight 4978.
According to the statements of officials, including Alyaksandr Lukashenka himself, the line which the regime has chosen to avoid accountability for hijacking Flight 4978 is to insist that there was no forced landing with the use of military jets. They avoid mentioning the threat of the alleged bomb onboard the plane which an air traffic controller communicated to Flight 4978 pilots as the reason why they had to land in Minsk.
Meanwhile, it has been established that a) the information about the “bomb” was announced in the Minsk international airport before the Flight 4978 departed Athens, b) the email allegedly warning of the bomb threat was received by Minsk airport officials after the pilots had already changed course to land in Minsk, c) on the ground protocols for such threats were not followed by the Belarusian authorities after Flight 4978 landed, and d) there was no bomb found onboard the aircraft.
It is obvious that the Belarusian authorities intentionally misled the ICAO fact-finding effort. They withheld from the ICAO volumes of material evidence in violation of the Chicago Convention provisions. Belarusian national criminal procedure requires appropriate “urgent investigative and other procedural measures to establish and secure traces of the crime.” When Flight 4978 was diverted, there were already at least two associated criminal cases open by the investigative authorities including one against Mr Pratasevich. According to national legislation, Belarusian investigators were obliged to secure and retain evidence such as messages from the Minsk airport email box.
This and other omissions unfavorable to the narrative of the Belarusian authorities should be construed as designed to deliberately cover up a conspiracy to hijack Flight 4978. Under international rules, a failure to preserve evidence leads to a presumption that the lost information was unfavorable to the concealing party. The impossibility to attribute the unavailability of evidence to any individual or State cannot be interpreted in favor of the authorities which are bound by law to preserve it and have full control over it. On the contrary, it only exacerbates their liability for committing steps leading to the concealment of the evidence and misleading the ICAO Council with a view of avoiding accountability.
A material witness who can bring additional light to the course of events during the incident is Oleg Galegov, an air traffic controller who was on duty at the Minsk airport at the time of the diversion of Flight 4978 and who later fled to Poland. His account of events should be reflected in this report, possibly as an attachment.
I would like to note that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York on January 20, 2022, filed an indictment charging Leonid Churo, the Director General of the Republican Unitary Air Navigation Services Enterprise (“Belaeronavigatsia”), Oleg Kazyuchits, the Deputy Director General of Belaeronavigatsia, and two Belarusian state security services officers with conspiracy to commit aircraft piracy for engineering the diversion of the Flight carrying four U.S. citizens.
In light of the abovementioned, I would like to appeal to you, Mr. President, with the following requests and suggestions:
1. To read this letter aloud during the ICAO Council debate on January 31, 2022, and to attach it to the record.
2. To suggest to the ICAO members to support the position that the withholding of evidence by the Belarusian authorities be assessed as implicating the Belarusian authorities in deliberate obstruction of the ICAO investigation.
3. To inform ICAO members about the U.S. lawsuit as a method of holding accountable those who knowingly endangered the safety of their nationals who were onboard flight 4978.
4. To attach to the ICAO report evidence provided to the Polish authorities by material witness Oleg Galegov — an air traffic controller who was in the air traffic control tower during the entire time of the operation to force Flight 4978 to land in Minsk.
5. To send the report to the President of the United Nations Security Council since this incident through the blatant violation of the fundamental rules and norms of the international civil aviation became a threat to international peace and security and therefore it requires consideration in this ultimate international security authority.
6. To consider publishing the final version of the ICAO report about this incident with all its addendums on the ICAO website for unimpeded public access.
Thank you for providing this opportunity to offer additional facts about the incident that has such an importance for Belarusians and for the global agenda.
Sincerely,
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya
Leader of democratic Belarus”.
