Confusion reigns as Ukrainian Foreign Ministry officials contradict each other over alleged hijacking of plane at Kabul Airport

Ukraine's Foreign Ministry spokesman has refuted a statement from his own department's second-in-command that a plane sent by Kiev to retrieve citizens from Afghanistan was hijacked by militants, causing confusion over the facts.

The situation started late on Monday when Ukraine's Deputy Foreign Minister Yevgeny Yenin claimed that an aircraft that was supposed to evacuate the country's citizens from Afghanistan after the Taliban seized Kabul was hijacked by unknown assailants and, instead, took a different load of passengers to Iran.

"Our plane was hijacked," Yenin told Western-funded Hromadske TV. "Last Tuesday, we actually had our plane stolen – it flew to Iran with an unknown group of passengers on board, instead of taking Ukrainians out."

However, less than a day later, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko denied that any plane had been hijacked, stating that reports "by some media outlets" do not "correspond to reality."

According to Nikolenko, Tenin was simply explaining the "unprecedented level of difficulties that diplomats had to face in order to pull out Ukrainians."

He did not clarify where the Iranian hijacking story had come from or why the deputy minister had told the press that armed people had stolen the plane if this was indeed not the case.

Iranian officials also later refuted the story, saying that a Ukrainian plane landed in the country's Mashhad airport to refuel before continuing to Kiev.

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