In 2014, Vladimir Putin ordered to shoot down a passenger plane which was reported to be carrying a bomb and targeting the opening of the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, he said in a recent biographic documentary.
‘Putin’, the film by pro-Kremlin journalist Andrey Kondrashov, is available on the Internet.
According to the Russian leader, he received a telephone call from security officers responsible for the Sochi Olympics on Feb. 7, 2014.
“He reported that a plane that was to have fled Istanbul from Ukraine had been hijacked. The takers demanded landing in Sochi,” Putin said.
The authors state that it was a Turkish airline carrier’s Boeing 737-800 which was taking a flight Kharkiv-Istanbul. The pilot allegedly managed to tell a dispatcher that one of the passengers got a bomb and ordered them to fly to Sochi. Putin’s security forces were convinced that terrorists wanted to disrupt the opening of the Olympics.
“I asked (the siloviki): what do you mean to do? Their answer was predictable: we should act in accordance with the plan envisaged for such situations, i.e. to down the plane. And I told them to act in accordance with the plan. In such a situation, there is always something one has to sacrifice,” Putin said.
Then it became clear that it was just a ‘prank of a drunk’ and the aircraft flew to Istanbul, he added.
“The president took over full responsibility for the situation,” Alexander Bortnikov, Chairman of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said. Notably, the incident on the opening day of the Olympics has never been reported earlier.
belsat.eu
