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Passengers tell of panic and fear after plane diverted by Belarus


The first the passengers on flight FR4978 from Athens knew that anything was out of the ordinary was when the Ryanair Boeing 737-800, on a scheduled flight to the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, went into a dramatic dive 10 minutes before it was due to land.

“We all on the plane panicked, because we thought we were going to crash,” Lithuanian passenger Raselle Grigoryeva, told ABC News. While the pilot announced an emergency diversion to Minsk, no explanation was given.

“This was a sudden dive, changing the altitude very drastically,” Grigoryeva, 37, said. “It was very violent. I’ve never felt this on an airplane. Everybody was in shock.”

One passenger became particularly agitated. “He started panicking, and saying that this was because of him,” said Monika Simkiene, a 40-year-old Lithuanian, of Belarusian opposition journalist Roman Protasevich, 26.

Edvinas Dimsa, 37, told Agence-France Presse that Protasevich was “not screaming. But he was very much afraid. It looked like if the window had been open, he would have jumped out of it.”

The flight left the Greek capital at 7.29am GMT with 171 passengers and crew on board and was diverted two-and-a-quarter hours later, minutes before entering Lithuanian airspace, after Minsk scrambled a MiG fighter jet to escort it down.

Once on the ground, another passenger said Belarus officials had resorted to physical force to detain the journalist, who appeared “super-scared”. The passenger said they had “looked at him directly into his eyes, and he was very sad”.

Passengers from flight FR4978 after landing in Vilnius following the ordeal.
Passengers from flight FR4978 after landing in Vilnius following the ordeal. Photograph: Petras Malūkas/AFP/Getty Images

Another passenger told Lithuania’s Delfi news that Protasevich, who is wanted in Belarus for his role in broadcasting huge opposition protests in Minsk last year, was visibly trembling when he left the plane surrounded by officers: “We asked him what was going on … and he said: ‘The death penalty awaits me here.’”

Held on the ground in Minsk, the flight did not take off again until 5.47pm GMT. “We were eight hours there,” one unnamed passenger told Reuters. “We didn’t get any information what happened, only what we could find on the internet.”

Grigoryeva told ABC that the Belarusian security officials searched the passengers’ belongings and bodies after placing them in small guarded rooms. “We didn’t know if we were going to fly home then. They were keeping us as prisoners,” she said.

Several passengers felt sorry for Protasevich and discussed refusing to reboard the plane until he was released, but eventually decided against it for fear they might be arrested themselves, she told the US broadcaster.

Saulius Danauskas told Bloomberg that while Belarus officials “made a big show” of searching everyone, even babies, with sniffer dogs for a suspected bomb as the pretext for the diversion, “it was clear that this operation was after this one man”.

Roman Protasevich attempts to cover an opposition rally in Minsk in 2017.
Roman Protasevich attempts to cover an opposition rally in Minsk in 2017. Photograph: EPA

The 50 to 60 officers involved in the two-and-a-half hour search showed no urgency, Danauskas said. “It all happened in an old-fashioned Soviet manner,” he said. “Pandemic or no pandemic – no one cared. It was very unpleasant.”

Arthur Six, 25, a French national, said he had previously known little about Belarus, whose authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, claimed a sixth term in office last August in an election widely seen as rigged. “Now I learned that this is a dictatorship,” Six said.



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