The General Prosecutor’s Office of Poland has ordered the initiation of a criminal case in connection with the forced landing in Minsk of an aircraft that belongs to the Polish division of the Irish airline Ryanair.
Poland is requesting access to the liner’s black boxes in order to determine the arguments that led to the decision to change the course, Simon Sinkowski, the country’s deputy foreign minister, said on Tuesday. On the air of the Athens news agency, he said:
“I believe that the Polish attorney general will want to hear the black box tapes, if they have survived. This will be the subject of an investigation. The plane is currently in Lithuania. I hope that in the coming days our prosecutors will be able to directly contact the evidence and the film crew, which is located in Vilnius. The prosecutor’s office is already in contact with the Lithuanian side ”.
The diplomat is convinced that first, one should understand the situation in the air, inside the airliner, in order to find out what arguments were required for the crew to make a decision to change the course, while the plane practically reached the border with Lithuania.
Irish Foreign Minister Simon Kawney said yesterday that Minsk airport is not the closest and the plane could continue on its route. However, the Belarusian Ministry of Transport insists: the transcript of the negotiations of the Belarusian air traffic controllers with the Ryanair pilots convincingly testifies that there was no pressure on the pilots, they themselves made the decision to make an emergency landing.
Washington calls on immediately convene the ICAO (Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization), coordinating with the European Union the response to the Ryanair incident.
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