America’s pursuit of Edward Snowden took a dramatic turn on Tuesday night with a plane carrying Bolivia’s President Evo Morales back home from Moscow being rerouted to Austria and subjected to a search following suspicion that he was taking the fugitive NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden with him.
As the search proved futile with no sign of Snowden being on board, the plane left Vienna after a 13-hour stopover, Bolivia accused France, Portugal and Spain, of acting under American pressure and denying the President’s plane access to their airspace. France, however, denied having refused the use of its airspace. “I’m not a criminal,” the Austria Press Agency quoted Morales as saying at Vienna airport.
What apparently triggered the suspicion of a Snowden getaway was an offhand remark by President Morales in Moscow that he might be happy to host the whistleblower, whose asylum prospects were becoming increasingly bleak with many countries turning down his plea.
“We don’t know who invented this big lie. We want to express our displeasure because this has put the President’s life at risk,” Bolivia’s Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca told a news conference in la Paz. He said France and Portugal would have to explain why they canceled authorisation for the plane, claiming that the decision had put the President’s life at risk.
“The ambassador for Spain in Austria has just informed us that there is no authorisation to fly over Spanish territory and that at 9 am on Wednesday they would be in contact with us again,” said Defence Minister Ruben Saavedra, adding that the Spanish Government had put as a condition for passage the “revision of the presidential plane.”
Bolivia’s UN envoy Sacha llorentty Solíz was quoted by Reuters as saying that the US was behind the order to divert the plane, adding the search of the plane was a violation of international law.
Bolivia on Wednesday lodged a complaint with United Nations and planned another to the UN Human Rights Commission.“As a Government, we are filing complaints worldwide,” said Vice-President and acting head of State Alvaro Garcia. “We have already made the complaint to UN and in the next few hours, we are making a complaint to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights,” Garcia said.
President Morales himself was quoted as telling reporters before his departure from Vienna that his unscheduled halt in Vienna was akin to “being held hostage”. Dismissive of the thought that he could have taken along someone without a valid passport, he reportedly countered: “How could we have a person in our plane who has problems with his homelandIJ He has never sought asylum in Bolivia. We are very responsible in our actions and our respect for international conventions.”
In a midnight Press conference, Bolivian Vice-President Alvaro Garcia said that not only France and Portugal, but also Italy and Spain were denying the plane permission to fly through their airspace.
But Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba are among 21 countries that have been approached by Snowden for asylum with the help of Wikileaks’ legal advisor Sarah Harrison.
There was no immediate comment from Washington on the dramatic turn and the diplomatic spat but State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki dismissed allegations of vendetta.
“What we’ve been communicating (to various countries) is, of course, what we’ve been communicating publicly, that Mr Snowden has been accused of leaking classified information,” Psaki said.