ICAO has released a report on forced landing of Ryanair FR4978 flight on Athens-Vilnius route. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the leader of democratic forces, commented on the release.
Today, ICAO published a report on the details of the incident with Ryanair flight FR4978 in the airspace of Belarus. The report was made available to all 193 ICAO Member States, including 36 countries elected to the Special Council.
I am grateful to ICAO for publishing and starting public work on this case. Last summer, my team appealed to the President of the ICAO Council to conduct a thorough investigation into the hijacking of the plane and the arrest of Raman Pratasevich and Sofia Sapega. We have been in contact with the leadership of the organization since then.
The next step is that on January 31, representatives of the ICAO Council will hold a discussion based on the conclusions of the report. This is an important stage, because today’s report did not name the perpetrators, but only became a starting point in the investigation of the crime. Belarusians learned from the actions of the regime: it is possible to break the law in a matter of seconds, and the restoration of justice always takes more time. But we will achieve this, and the first steps have already been taken.
It should be noted that Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has repeatedly raised the topic of the investigation at meetings with politicians and in her speeches.
In July 2021, Tsikhanouskaya met with Michael O’Leary, the head of Ryanair, where the CEO of Ryanair gave her a report on the results of the company’s own investigation. Sviatlana has repeatedly raised the issue of the investigation at meetings with influential politicians, in particular, discussed the investigation into the seizure of the Ryanair board with Canadian Foreign Minister Marc Garneau. It is worth mentioning that at the opening of the international legal conference in Nuremberg, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, among other things, called for depriving the regime of the right to vote in ICAO.
