Finnair has canceled all weekend flights between Helsinki and Bangkok. Thai officials have announced Bangkok International Airport will remain closed until at least Monday. Meanwhile, nearly 300 Finnair passengers stranded in Bangkok were flown to Helsinki from Phuket, a tropical resort island in southern Thailand on Friday night.

Hundreds of other Finnair customers are still waiting in Bangkok. The Finnish airline Finnair is planning four more flights to the Thai resort of Phuket to get passengers stuck in the capital Bangkok back home. The first of the new flights is expected to land at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport early Sunday morning. The others will be coming on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat declared emergency rule at Bangkok’s two airports late Thursday, but later he said that officials were negotiating with the activists. However, Thai aviation officials said the airports would remain closed until Monday evening at the earliest.

So far Finnair has canceled more than half a dozen flights to Bangkok and as many return flights since the Thai capital’s international airport was shut down by protesters on Tuesday. The cancellations affect some 3000 passengers, most of them non-Finns. Finnair has been strongly marketing its Helsinki connections as offering the fastest routes from northern Europe to Asia.The airline says its leisure flights to and from Thailand are operating normally, as are its flights in and out of violence-hit Mumbai, India.

News by LYE – yle.fi