(MENAFN) Chay Bowes, a journalist working for RT, was detained by Romanian authorities upon his arrival in Bucharest on Thursday, where he had intended to report on the country's upcoming presidential election.

According to Bowes, police boarded his plane immediately after landing and were specifically looking for him. “They asked who I was and took me off the plane – there were six of them,” he said. The officers reportedly told him that their superiors wanted to speak with him and questioned him about his reasons for traveling to Romania.

Despite being an EU citizen, Bowes was deported shortly after the questioning and flown to Istanbul, according to his wife.

Bowes has been affiliated with RT since 2023. Before that, he co-founded the Irish investigative outlet The Ditch in 2021 and was involved in exposing a sensitive leak by then-Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar — a case that initially sparked a criminal investigation but was eventually closed.

Romania’s presidential election is now set to be held in two rounds, on May 4 and May 18, after the country’s Constitutional Court nullified the results of the initial vote from November 2024. That election had been won by Calin Georgescu, a critic of NATO and of weapons shipments to Ukraine, with 23% of the vote as an independent candidate.

However, the court annulled the result, citing supposed campaign violations and intelligence alleging Russian interference — claims Moscow has denied. Subsequent investigations revealed that a TikTok campaign originally thought to be Kremlin-backed was actually funded by Romania’s ruling pro-EU National Liberal Party (PNL), whose member Nicolae Ciuca lost in the November election.

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