US charges four Belarus officials with aircraft piracy over flight diversion - BBC News

The US has charged four Belarusian officials with aircraft piracy over the diversion of a passenger plane to Minsk last May.

Prosecutors allege the officials used a false bomb threat to divert a Ryanair flight to the Belarus capital, where opposition journalist Roman Protasevich and his partner were detained.

FBI officials said the incident was a "reckless violation".

Earlier this week a UN report concluded the bomb threat was deliberately false.

A spokesperson for the US Justice Department said the four men, Leonid Mikalaevich Churo and Oleg Kazyuchits - the director general and deputy director general of Belarus' state air navigation authority - and state security officers Andrey Anatolievich Lnu and Fnu Lnu, remain at large in Belarus.

According to the charges, Mr Churo personally communicated the false bomb threat to Belarusian air traffic officials before the Ryanair flight to Vilnius in Lithuania took off from the Greek capital Athens.

The air traffic officials waited for the plane to enter Belarusian air space before alerting the pilot to the purported bomb threat in order to force it to land in Minsk.

Mr Churo's deputy, Mr Kazyuchits, later attempted to have the incident record falsified to hide the bomb threat and the involvement of state security officials, the indictment alleges.

At the time, Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko insisted the bomb threat had been real and he was "thinking about the country's security".