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The spouses who lived in Klaipeda came home much later than expected.
The plane took a sudden turn
Dr. G. Mikalauskas says it should have been a normal trip home by plane, which didn’t seem to promise anything bad. The pilots of the plane flying from Athens had already urged the passengers to prepare for landing, soon the plane was due to land in Vilnius.
Suddenly, the plane made a quick 180-degree turn and the message sounded that they would be landing in Minsk.
That anxiety only grew when the plane’s passengers saw many fire and ambulance tanks at the airport through the windows. “Then I really thought that the plane had broken down,” says the interlocutor.
“At that time, some passengers thought it was due to bad weather in Vilnius, I thought it was due to some engine failure. Only later, already at the disembarkation, the flight attendants said that the pilots had been notified of the bomb on board. I think it is good that they did not tell the passengers, because there were all kinds of anxiety and conjectures ”, recalls G. Mikalauskas.
The last members of the crew got off the plane.
He tried to quell the fear in every way.
From the plane, the passengers were told to get on 5 each, they were all placed in police cars and taken to a kind of parking lot, which was immediately surrounded by soldiers and policemen. He ordered help with luggage, which began to be searched here by border guards with dogs. Someone’s belongings were thrown on the ground, the doctor believes that it may have been the luggage of the detainee Romanas Protasevičius.
Subsequently, all the passengers were taken to a windowless room, which was also guarded by soldiers. Here people were searched with a metal detector, their documents were checked, everyone was filmed. The inspectors even touched everyone from head to toe with their hands, even took off their socks …
“We were three hours in that room without water or toilets, there was no place to sit,” recalls G. Mikalauskas. Although people asked what awaited them next, no one provided any information. And people were whispering to each other that they might be destined to be hostages in the negotiations between the two countries …
“Everyone tried to dispel fear and hard thoughts in their own way: who drank beer, who laughed or cheered up,” recalls the doctor.
A fighter was escorted to the wall.
Later Romanian and Austrian diplomats appeared, asking if the passengers had any complaints. However, according to G. Mikalauskas, the passengers were afraid to complain, because the soldiers of a foreign state walked with rows of medals on their chests …
Passengers’ fears calmed somewhat only when they boarded the plane after reading the first reports of the incident, which had already appeared in the media. Everyone has realized that this unprecedented act of state terror is already being followed around the world.
However, even when the air took off, the stress did not disappear, because the Belarusian regime fighter accompanied the plane with the passengers leaving for the Lithuanian state border.
Like a return to Soviet times
Dr. G. Mikalauskas says that he had never before thought that similar things could happen in the 21st century: someone can just hijack a plane and “pick up” its passengers. It was something unheard of and difficult to imagine today. Those hours of uncertainty in a foreign land were like a return to the Soviet era as a time machine.
“It just came to our attention then. In those hours, we clearly feel how close we are to death and how fragile human life is in general. We have realized that when we get involved in our daily routine, we often underestimate and We don’t realize how much we have, we don’t value freedom, ”says a doctor who has lived through a real nightmare.
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