Iran may have mistakenly shot down the airliner above Tehran with 176 people, media reports.
European and US security officials said they believe that reports suggesting that the Ukrainian airliner was shot down by an Iranian surface to air missile in error are credible.
Ukraine earlier said it was examining whether a missile strike brought down the aircraft – but Iran ruled this out.
The crash of flight PS752 came just hours after Iran carried out missile strikes on two airbases housing US forces in Iraq.
CBS News quoted US intelligence sources as saying a satellite detected infrared “blips” of two missile launches, followed by another blip of an explosion. The working theory is based on continuing analysis of data from satellites, radar and electronic data collected routinely by US military and intelligence.
US President Donald Trump hinted that Iranians could have mistakenly assumed they were under attack from US and accidentally shot down the Ukrainian plane with missile.
On the other side, Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation (CAOI) chief Ali Abedzadeh said: “The plane, which was initially headed west to leave the airport zone, turned right following a problem and was headed back to the airport at the moment of the crash.”
“Several domestic and foreign flights were flying in Iranian space at the same altitude of 8,000ft (2,400m). The issue of the missile’s impact on the aircraft cannot be true in any way,” he said and added that pilots did not send any distress signals.
Earlier today (Thursday 09 Jan 2020), Oleksiy Danylov, the secretary of Ukraine’s security and defence council, said in a Facebook post (in Ukrainian) that there are four main possible crash causes were being considered:
- an anti-aircraft missile strike, specifically a Tor missile, taking into account reports of a missile being found near the crash site
- a mid-air collision with a drone or other flying object
- engine destruction/explosion due to technical reasons
- an explosion inside the plane as a result of a terror attack
We will follow up this story once we gather more information as well as preliminary report from the black boxes.
