(Bloomberg) -- When a Ryanair Holdings Plc jet was forced to land in Minsk, 26-year-old Raman Pratasevich, who was arrested by Belarusian authorities, wasn’t the only one who didn’t resume the flight from Athens to Vilnius.
The episode -- with a fighter jet escort and armed officers in guard -- was unsettling for most passengers, provoking international outcry and investigations by European security agencies.
But aside from Pratasevich and his girlfriend, three more passengers stayed in Minsk, two Belarusians and one Greek national, according to a Greek government official with knowledge of the ongoing investigation.
Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary has alleged KGB agents working for Alexander Lukashenko’s regime were on board the aircraft, though his claim hasn’t been confirmed. Pratasevich himself was concerned about being followed before he boarded the flight in Athens, accoding to his colleagues.
According to footage broadcast on the Belarus state television, the Greek national was Iason Zisis. When contacted by Bloomberg, Zisis, a researcher in advanced computational engineering, confirmed that he was on the flight and said the diversion proved to be handy for him.
“I was flying to Minsk anyway, with an evening connection in Vilnius,” Zisis said on LinkedIn. After the interruption, as passengers lined up to return to the aircraft, “I stood at the back of the queue and I asked to stay, and they allowed me.”
With a PhD in scientific computing from Eindhoven University of Technology, Zisis said he lives in Patras, Southern Greece. He said that he was heading to Minsk to visit his wife, who lives there.
A Greek government official, who asked not to be named, said that the investigation so far hasn’t indicated Zisis’s involvement in the incident. Some of the passengers on board have said they had not realized the forced landing took place to snatch a dissident off the flight until they reached Vilnius.
Zisis says that he finds it inexcusable that journalists were the first to track him and reach him, and not the Greek government. He said that no one had called to confirm his whereabouts and whether he’s O.K. when he was missing from the list of passengers who landed in Vilnius after the diversion.
Zisis, whose research interests include hypervelocity impacts and computational fluid dynamics, says he plans to stay in Minsk with his wife for the time being, despite a looming flights embargo and that he had no issues with authorities there about his stay.
“That was my intention from the beginning,” he says. “In Covid times, we are all teleworking anyway.”
©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
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