The forced landing of a Ryanair flight in Minsk last May prompted international investigations over accusations that a bomb hoax was manufactured to arrest a journalist.
United States prosecutors in Manhattan have charged four officials of the government of Belarus with conspiracy to commit aircraft piracy in the 2021 forced landing of a European airliner in Minsk, where a prominent opposition journalist aboard the plane was seized.
The charge was contained in an indictment filed on Thursday in Federal District Court.
In response to a purported bomb threat, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, Belarus’s authoritarian president, sent a fighter jet on May 23 to intercept the Ryanair Boeing 737-800 carrying some 170 passengers from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania — among them the journalist, Roman Protasevich. The forcing down of the plane and his seizure led to international outrage.
The bomb threat was a fake, orchestrated by senior Belarus officials who were seeking to detain Mr. Protasevich in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, the indictment says.
The move was seen as a marker of how far Mr. Lukashenko, with the support of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, was willing to go to repress dissent in his country.
The indictment does not charge Mr. Lukashenko. The officials named in the indictment were Leonid Mikalaevich Churo, the director general of Belarus’s state air navigation authority, his deputy and two officers of the country’s security services.
According to the indictment, the defendants were critical participants in the conspiracy to divert the Ryanair flight and force it to land.
“There was, in fact, no bomb on board the aircraft,” the indictment said. “Belarusian government authorities fabricated the threat.”
Mr. Churo personally communicated the false bomb threat to the staff at the Minsk air traffic control center, even before the flight took off from Athens, and directed the control center to instruct the flight to divert to Minsk in response to the purported threat, the indictment said.
It said the purpose of the plot to divert the plane was to allow the Belarusian security services to arrest Mr. Protasevich and his girlfriend. He had been living in exile in Lithuania and was wanted by the Belarusian government.
The indictment also charges that after the forced landing, Belarusian government officials engaged in a cover-up, which included directing Belarusian air traffic authorities to falsify incident reports regarding the diversion of the flight, in order to conceal the fabrication of the bomb threat and the role Belarus’s security services played in the scheme.
The indictment said the defendants worked with other officials, including the senior air traffic controller at the Minsk air traffic control center.
Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement that countries around the world have long cooperated to keep air travel safe.
“We are committed to holding accountable these central participants in a shocking conspiracy to commit aircraft piracy that not only violated international norms and U.S. criminal law, but also potentially endangered the lives of four U.S. citizens and scores of other innocent passengers on board,” Mr. Williams said.
Mr. Williams credited F.B.I. counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigators for what he said was the “prompt and public explanation” in the indictment of what actually happened to the flight.
Mr. Williams announced the charges along with the Justice Department; Michael J. Driscoll, who leads the F.B.I.’s New York office, and Commissioner Keechant Sewell of the New York Police Department.
The defendants are based in Belarus and remain at large, the authorities said.
