O'Leary: Forced landing in Belarus was 'state-sponsored hijacking'

O'Leary: Forced landing in Belarus was 'state-sponsored hijacking'
newstalk.com

And Morales was not arrested so there is a difference. We don‘t know if Snowden would have been arrested or if in that case the plan would have landed. Assuming it wouldn‘t, would anyone really shoot it down, killing a foreign president? I cannot imagine, the repercussions would be enormous.

edit: Additionally it seems nobody forced the plane to land in Vienna. Instead what happened was that France revoked the permission to fly over France. That‘s all. The pilot chose where to land and had various options and chose Vienna. Then nothing happened after the landing.

It‘s not even close.

https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1396771259724206082...

But even if we take as such, there are some major differences.

1. This was a journalist, not a government employee who stole classified information.

2. They claimed a bomb threat, and used a fighter jet to escort the plane down. There was no order to make this official, and as such was a hijacking.

3. The dictator president of Belarus has been arresting journalist and anyone else who may challenge him. Including anyone who runs against him in elections. Can't vote for people in jail/dead.

There are several reasons that wasn't even remotely comparable, and the most obvious one is that that was diplomacy (the US closing airspaces and thereby giving the plane no choice but to land).

That kind of power is wielded by the US becuase it's a powerful global power AND because it has good diplimatic relations with the countries in question (France, Spain etc).

The pilot in the linked incident had to request to land (And could have returned to the starting airport but chose the closest, perhaps hoping to continue).

In the lukashenko incident, there were agents on board the plane. The emergency diversion wasn't to the nearest airport, but to the more distant Minsk. It's a hijacking. The bolivian case was not. No matter how shady the purposes were of the US trying to force the plane down, it doesn't chanhge that. They have every right to ASK their allies Spain and France to close their airspace for the Bolivian presidents' aircraft. Spain and France had every right to refuse (Of course knowing that their diplomatic relations with the US could take a hit).

Stop making this silly comparison please.