Evo Morales grounding incident

On 1 July 2013, president Evo Morales of Bolivia, who had been attending a conference of gas-exporting countries in Russia, gave an interview to the RT television network in which he appeared predisposed to offer asylum to Edward Snowden.

[1] The day after his TV interview, Morales's Dassault Falcon 900 FAB-001, carrying him back to La Paz from Moscow, took off from Vnukovo Airport, flew uninterrupted over Poland and the Czech Republic, but then unexpectedly landed in Vienna, Austria.

[5][6] The refusals for entry into French, Spanish, and Italian airspace ostensibly for "technical reasons", strongly denounced by Bolivia, Ecuador, and other South American nations, were attributed to rumors disseminated by the US that Snowden was on board.

[19] In April 2015, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange claimed to having deliberately leaked the false information about Snowden being on the plane to the U.S. as part of several "special measures" to distract secret services.

[21][22] Assange said the grounding of Morales's plane "reveals the true nature of the relationship between Western Europe and the United States" as "a phone call from U.S. intelligence was enough to close the airspace to a booked presidential flight, which has immunity".