Belarus fakes bomb threat, diverts flight to get journo in 'Soviet manner'

Raman Pratasevich is a critic of president Alexander Lukashenko and had covered protests last year against the strongman's brutal suppression.

Journalist Raman Pratasevich was asked just one question when a Belarusian official singled him out from a crowd of passengers huddled on a bus after a fighter jet forced their flight to make an emergency landing in Minsk.

“One officer asked, pointing a finger at him: do you speak Russian?” recalled Saulius Danauskas, who was on the Ryanair plane from Athens to Vilnius that was intercepted 10 minutes before its expected arrival in Lithuania. “They made a big show. But it was clear that this operation was after this one man.”

The grandfather, returning from a holiday in Greece with