Four Belarusian officials have been charged with piracy for diverting a Ryanair jet to arrested a dissent journalist on board, US prosecutors have announced.
Officials include the head of Belarus's air navigation service Leonid Churo, his deputy Oleg Kazyuchits, and two other Belarusian state security agents who were not named in the charges.
The four are accused of phoning in a fake bomb threat to Ryanair Flight 4978 as it crossed Belarusian airspace in May last year, and then dispatching a fighter jet to escort the Boeing 737 to Minsk airport.
Upon landing, passengers were hauled off the jet and two of them - dissident journalist Roman Protasevich, and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega - were arrested.
Ryanair Flight 4978 is searched by dog handlers at Minsk airport after it was diverted using a fake bomb threat so a journalist on board could be arrested
Mr Protasevich, who had been central to reporting protests against dictator Alexander Lukashenko's regime a year earlier, was then dragged off to detention where it is believed he was tortured before appearing in confessional videos.
The pair remain in Belarus, where Mr Protasevich is under house arrest on charges of inciting unrest for which he faces up to 15 years in jail.
Miss Sapega, a Russian citizen, is facing up to six years in jail on similar charges. It was reported last month that she is due to be freed from house arrest.
The piracy charges, announced Friday by federal prosecutors in New York, recounted how the flight was diverted as it travelled between Greece - where Mr Protasevich had been attending a conference - to his home-in-exile in Lithuania.
'Since the dawn of powered flight, countries around the world have cooperated to keep passenger airplanes safe,' U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said.
'The defendants shattered those standards by diverting an airplane to further the improper purpose of repressing dissent and free speech.'
Dissident journalist Roman Protasevich (left) and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega (right) were arrested when their Ryanair flight was forced to land in Minsk on May 23
Ryanair said Belarusian flight controllers told the pilots there was a bomb threat against the jetliner and ordered
