After last year’s international incident in which Belarus controllers ordered a Ryanair flight to land in Minsk, citing a bomb threat, Ryanair has urged the country to guarantee they will not repeat a forced landing of one of its flights as it did last May. The airline says other airlines should not over fly Belarus without this statement of guarantee from the country.
Once it was on the ground in the incident last year, a Belarusian dissident journalist who was on the plane was arrested. The United States has charged four Belarus officials with aircraft piracy for the incident. A United Nations report says the bomb threat was falsified and that Belarus withheld crucial information about the investigation from a U. N. fact-finding team and called the bomb threat “deliberately false.”