Snowden Asylum Request: Is The NSA Leaker On A Flight To Havana Right Now?

UPDATE: The Washington Post reports that the Moscow-Havana flight may simply be averting bad weather in changing its flight route, as air pressure in areas which the flight normally passes through was expected to cause heavy turbulence.

Aeroflot Flight 150 out of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport this morning has departed from its usual flight course to avoid United States airspace, in a move which has led some to suspect that it is carrying Edward Snowden, the former NSA leaker whom American authorities consider a fugitive. The Aeroflot flight is bound for Havana, Cuba, where Snowden would have to stop over on his way to Venezuela, Bolivia, or Nicaragua, the three countries where his petition for asylum has been accepted. A journalist for the Moscow Times, Nikolaus Von Twickel, wrote on Twitter that a spokeswoman for the airline said, "Thank you, goodbye" and hung up on him when he asked if the flight to Havana had been re-routed.

For weeks now, Snowden has been holed up in the Sheremetyevo airport. He was seen to be facing stiff odds against him even after the offer of asylum was extended to him by the three Latin American nations, as any possible routes to them out of Russia were said to likely pass through the airspace of nations hostile to the idea of Snowden’s asylum.

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"Nations control their airspace up to the heavens, the old saying goes," said John Q. Mulligan, an aviation law expert at DePaul University's College of Law, told McClatchy. "Just look at the map. It's probably possible to figure out a route that wouldn't touch the airspace of the United States or any friendly nations, but it wouldn't be easy."

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According to FlightAware, Flight 150 was expected to last about 12 hours and 15 minutes. It left this morning at 6:13 a.m. EST (2:13 p.m. Moscow time). The Washington Post writes that the usual route of the flight, which flies from Moscow to Havana about four times a week, takes it over Scandinavia, Iceland and Greenland before it turns south to pass over Canada and the continental United States: the shortest and safest route possible. But in this instance, Flight 150 buzzed west over Europe, crossing Belarus, Poland, Germany and France – the latter of which had revoked access to the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales when it was thought that it was carrying Snowden, but later apologized – before crossing the Atlantic Ocean en route to Cuba.

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The suspicions came just two days after a Russian lawmaker with close ties to the Kremlin tweeted that Edward Snowden had accepted Venezuela’s offer of “humanitarian asylum”. The lawmaker deleted the post only a few minutes after posting it.