United States prosecutors in Manhattan have charged four officials of the government of Belarus with conspiracy to commit aircraft piracy in the 2021 forced landing of a European airliner in Minsk, where a prominent opposition journalist aboard the plane was seized.
The charge was contained in an indictment filed on Thursday in Federal District Court.
In response to a purported bomb threat, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, Belarus’s authoritarian president, sent a fighter jet on May 23 to intercept the Ryanair Boeing 737-800 carrying some 170 passengers from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania — among them the journalist, Roman Protasevich. The forcing down of the plane and his seizure led to international outrage.
The bomb threat was a fake, orchestrated by senior Belarus officials who were seeking to detain Mr. Protasevich in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, the indictment says.
The move was seen as a marker of how far Mr. Lukashenko, who has governed Belarus for more than 27 years, was willing to go to crush dissent and extend his increasingly repressive rule. After jailing or scaring away most potential opponents, he claimed easy re-election in 2020, a result widely seen as fraudulent, sparking months of mass protests.
Mr. Lukashenko’s security forces violently suppressed the demonstrations and imprisoned thousands of people, drawing international condemnation. After the Ryanair diversion led to Western sanctions, he attracted thousands of migrants, mostly Afghan, to Belarus and urged them to cross illegally into Poland, trying to create a political crisis for NATO and the European Union.
Increasingly isolated and presiding over a struggling economy, Mr. Lukashenko has survived with the economic, military and diplomatic backing of his chief ally, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, another antagonist of the West.
The indictment does not charge Mr. Lukashenko. It names Leonid Mikalaevich Churo, the director general of Belarus’s state air navigation authority; his deputy, Oleg Kazyuchits; and two officers of the country’s security services whose full names were not known to prosecutors.
The defendants are based in Belarus and remain at large, the authorities said. As a result, it is unlikely that they will appear in a United States courtroom to answer the charges in the foreseeable future.
According to the indictment, the defendants were critical participants in the conspiracy to divert the Ryanair flight and force it to land.
“There was, in fact, no bomb on board the aircraft,” the indictment said. “Belarusian government authorities fabricated the threat.”
Mr. Churo personally communicated the false bomb threat to the staff at the Minsk air traffic control center, even before the flight took off from Athens, and directed the control center to instruct the flight to divert to Minsk in response to the purported threat, the indictment said.
It said the purpose of the plot to divert the plane was to allow the Belarusian security services to arrest Mr. Protasevich and his Russian girlfriend. He had been living in exile in Lithuania and was wanted by the Belarusian government.
The indictment also charges that after the forced landing, Belarusian government officials engaged in a cover-up, which included directing Belarusian air traffic authorities to falsify incident reports regarding the diversion of the flight, in order to conceal the fabrication of the bomb threat and the role Belarus’s security services played in the scheme.
The indictment said the defendants worked with other officials, including the senior air traffic controller at the Minsk air traffic control center.
Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement that countries around the world have long cooperated to keep air travel safe.
“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,” Mr. Williams said.
The statute under which the defendants were charged gives the federal government jurisdiction to prosecute because Americans were aboard.
Mr. Williams credited F.B.I. counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigators for what he said was the “prompt and public explanation” in the indictment of what actually happened to the flight.
Since Mr. Protasevich and his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, were taken into custody by Belarusian security agents, they have been seen only at a news briefing staged last June and in videos issued by the government. In a video released shortly after his arrest, Mr. Protasevich is shown confessing to taking part in organizing “mass unrest” — a statement his friends said was made under duress.
In the news briefing, Mr. Protasevich, seated beside Belarusian generals, praised Mr. Lukashenko, whom he had earlier called “a dictator” and compared to Hitler.
Mr. Williams announced the charges along with the Justice Department, Michael J. Driscoll, who leads the F.B.I.’s New York office, and Commissioner Keechant Sewell of the New York Police Department.
Richard Pérez-Peña contributed reporting.
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