RT journalist Chay Bowes, who was deported from Bucharest, said that Romanian authorities accused him of being a security threat.

The Irish reporter was detained upon arrival in the Romanian capital on a flight from Dublin on Thursday, where he had traveled to cover the upcoming re-run of the presidential election. He was put on a plane to Istanbul later that day.

Bowes, an EU citizen, said that shortly after touchdown in Bucharest, a group of police officers walked onto the tarmac and boarded the plane.

“They asked the cabin crew where I was. I identified myself, and three police came on to the plane and told me that I had to come with them, [and] that I was being detained,” the journalist said after arriving in Istanbul.

As other passengers watched “with amazement,” the police escorted Bowes for an interrogation. “I was asked questions in the vehicle by the officers – where I was going and who I was going to meet. I told them I was a journalist. They wanted to know who I was going to speak to, which I declined to tell them. I said I’m here to cover the election,” he said.

Bowes said he was then taken to “a smaller interrogation room with two chairs and a table.”

I was presented with a document, which was presumably stamped by a judge. They wouldn’t let me have a copy of it. They wouldn’t let me take a photograph of it. It said that I was a threat to the security of the state, and on that basis they were deporting me from Romania.

Bowes denounced the deportation as a “fundamental breach” of his rights as a journalist and an EU citizen. “I entered the country completely legally – to do my job. This is really quite shocking,” he said.

The presidential election in Romania will take place over two rounds, on May 4 and May 18. The dates were set in January after Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the results of the initial vote held in November 2024.

The original first round had been won by independent candidate Calin Georgescu, a vocal NATO critic and opponent of supplying weapons to Ukraine, who received 23% of the vote. Romania’s top court, however, cited “irregularities” in his campaign and referenced intelligence reports alleging Russian interference—allegations that Moscow denied.

It later emerged that a TikTok influencer campaign had been funded not by the Kremlin, but by the pro-EU Romanian National Liberal Party (PNL), which has governed the country for much of the past three decades. Its most prominent member, Nicolae Ciuca, was a losing candidate in the November election.

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