After the US announced the end of a 20-year-long military operation in Afghanistan and started to pull out soldiers, the Taliban went on an offensive against Afghanistan government forces.
Taliban on August 15 swept into Kabul, which resulted in the president of the country flee leaving the country and its citizen during such a crisis which further led the citizens to become more fearful.
However, it also forced the US and other countries to evacuate their embassy staff and people from the war-torn nation.
It is reported that unidentified armed hijackers took control of a Ukrainian plane and flew it to Iran after it arrived in Afghanistan last week to evacuate Ukrainians, reports Russian News Agency TASS.
A minister in Ukraine claimed on Tuesday that an evacuation flight was hijacked from Afghanistan on Sunday and taken to Iran. However, the claims have been denied by both Ukraine and Iran.
Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister Yevgeny Yenin was quoted as saying by Russian news agency Taas that the plane was hijacked by “armed people”. He said that the plane was stolen from Ukraine and “flew into Iran with an unidentified group of passengers on board”.
“Last Sunday, our plane was hijacked by other people. On Tuesday, the plane was practically stolen from us, it flew into Iran with an unidentified group of passengers onboard instead of airlifting Ukrainians. Our next three evacuation attempts were also not successful because our people could not get into the airport,” Yenin said.
He, however, did not divulge more information about what happened to the flight.
According to TASS, a military transport plane with 83 people on board, including 31 Ukrainians, arrived from Afghanistan to Kiev on Sunday.
However, Tehran and Kiev denied hijacking of any Ukrainian evacuation plane in Afghanistan, The Jerusalem Post reported.
The Iranian Civil Aviation Authority denied the report, saying that the plane refueled in Mashhad and then flew to Kiev.
According to the RBC Ukraine news agency, Oleg Nikolenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry denied the report as well, saying “There are no captured Ukrainian planes in Kabul or elsewhere. The information about the ‘captured plane’ that is being circulated by some media outlets is not true.”
Nikolenko clarified that Yenin was only generally explaining the unprecedented level of difficulties that diplomats had to face in evacuating Ukrainians. It is unclear why Yenin said that plane was hijacked by armed persons and “actually stolen” if this was not the case, The Jerusalem Post added.
