Russian-born journalist removed from Netanyahu’s flight to US over ‘connections’

A Russian-born Israeli journalist told AFP he was removed from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s flight to Washington on Tuesday moments before takeoff, after security agents said they needed to verify his “connections.”

Nick Kolyohin, a freelance reporter, had been scheduled to cover Netanyahu’s meeting with US President Donald Trump for three Russian television channels.

Unlike Netanyahu’s two most recent trips to the United States, reporters were allowed this time to travel aboard the prime minister’s plane, the Wing of Zion.

But after Kolyohin boarded the media section with about 10 other journalists and stowed his bags, he said, agents from Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security service approached him and asked him to disembark.

The prime minister’s office said in a statement to Hebrew-language website Yedioth Ahronoth that it had stopped Kolyohin travelling on the flight but could not say why “for security reasons.”

In a statement relayed by the same website, Shin Bet said “the service is entrusted, among other things, with the security of the Prime Minister. Within this framework, decisions are made to reduce the risk to the Prime Minister and the information in his environment.”

“It makes no sense to treat a journalist like this whom you invited onto the flight, who boarded with all the other journalists, whose belongings were already stowed, and then at the last second, in front of everyone, you humiliate him and kick him off,” Kolyohin said by phone.

“And afterwards you even present him as someone who poses a danger to the prime minister,” he added. “They took my belongings and checked them as if there was a bomb.”

He said the Shin Bet officers informed him that he was removed because his “connections” needed to be verified.

Kolyohin, 42, was born in Moscow and moved to Israel aged nine, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, during a major wave of Soviet Jewish immigration.

He told AFP he served in the Israeli military and later worked for a government agency in the prime minister’s office in 2011-2012, during one of Netanyahu’s earlier terms.

Today, he says he holds only Israeli citizenship.

He regularly works for international media outlets, including television channels in India and Britain.