Four government officials from Belarus have been indicted by a federal grand jury in New York with conspiracy to commit aircraft piracy involving a 2021 Ryanair flight, the U.S. Department of Justice reports.
Charges have been filed against Leonid Mikalaevich Churo, Oleg Kazyuchits, Andrey Anatolievich Lnu and Fnu Lnu, according to a Jan. 20 announcement by the DOJ. The four men allegedly orchestrated the diversion of Ryanair Flight 4978 while it was in flight May 23, 2021. Four U.S. nationals were among the more than 100 passengers on board the flight.
Court documents state the four Belarus officials engineered the diversion of the flight from its final destination of Vilnius, Lithuania to Minsk, Belarus in order to arrest a dissident Belarusian journalist who was on board the flight.
“Since the dawn of powered flight, countries around the world have cooperated to keep passenger airplanes safe,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York, said in in the annoucement. “The defendants shattered those standards by diverting an airplane to further the improper purpose of repressing dissent and free speech.”
The DOJ states that while the flight was enroute from Athens, Greece, to Vilnius when it was diverted to Minsk after a bomb threat was reported. According to the report, Belarusian government officials fabricated the threat, with the four defendants personally involved in carrying out the plot. When the flight was diverted, one of the defendants, Fnu Lnu, met the flight with Belarus security services personnel. The Belarus officials detained the dissident journalist and his female companion, according to the statement.
No bomb was found on the airline, the DOJ reports.
After the incident, Belarus government officials tried to cover up the incident by, among other actions, "to create false incident reports, including by doctoring the reports to misrepresent that the bomb threat was received at approximately the same time that the Flight entered Belarusian airspace and omit the fact that Fnu Lnu of the Belarusian security services was present in the operations room and directed activity during the Flight’s diversion," according to the statement.
This case was jointly investigated by the FBI’s New York Field Office, Counterintelligence Division Foreign Influence Task Force and the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, as well as several other national and international safety, security and law enforcement agencies, according to the DOJ.
"Thanks to the extraordinary investigative work of a joint team of FBI counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigators, today’s indictment provides a prompt and public explanation of what actually happened to the Flight," Williams said.
"We are committed to holding accountable these central participants in a shocking conspiracy to commit aircraft piracy that not only violated international norms and U.S. criminal law, but also potentially endangered the lives of four U.S. citizens and scores of other innocent passengers on board.”
If convicted, the defendants face from 20 years to life, according to the statement. They currently remain at large.
