Defector helps build case against Belarus over Ryanair flight it forced down

This summer, as Polish guards repelled migrants trying to cross their country’s eastern border with Belarus, one man who slipped furtively into Poland received a warm but top-secret welcome. Unlike the desperate people from Iraq and elsewhere seeking a better life in Europe, the man was offering a dramatic intelligence coup — inside information on the forced landing just a few weeks earlier in Minsk, the Belarusian capital, of a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. The plane’s passengers included a prominent opponent of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, the dissident journalist Roman Protasevich, who was arrested along with his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, when the plane landed in Minsk. European security officials who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss confidential information said that the man welcomed by the Poles had worked as an air traffic controller at Minsk’s airport. Since his defection, he has provided detailed evidence that the Ryanair flight was targeted for a fake bomb threat as part of an operation to grab Mr. Protasevich orchestrated by Belarus’s intelligence service, the officials said. Asked about the defection, Stanislaw Zaryn, director of Poland’s Department of National Security, declined to comment on specifics but said that Polish officials investigating what he described as the Ryanair “hijacking” had managed “to obtain an account of a direct witness of the actions taken at the control tower in Minsk.” Story has more. <br/>