Closing summary
We’re now closing our live coverage of the plane crash in this blog. You can follow today’s US reaction to the crash, including Trump’s new sanctions against Iran in our US politics blog.
Here’s a summary of key events today. Thanks for following along.
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A UK expert raised serious concerns over the integrity of the crash site. Photographs taken the day of the crash showed heavy machinery being used to move larger pieces of debris. Graham Braithwaite said: “Where you have flight recorders that tell you what has happened you can move quickly to clearing the site. But if the recorders are damaged [as the Iranians have said] then all you have is the forensic evidence at the site to tell you the story.”
- Hamid Baeidinejad, the Iranian ambassador to the UK, urged the west – including the UK – to stop politicising the inquiry into the Ukraine plane crash by rushing to premature judgment about its causes without hard evidence.
- Ukraine’s foreign minister, Vadym Prystaiko, said he and the Ukrainian president had met US embassy officials and obtained important data about the plane crash. Earlier in the day, Volodomir Zelenskiy said he was not ruling out the possibility that the plane was shot down and again called for “all international partners” the US, Britain and Canada in particular to share data and evidence relevant to the crash.
- French experts will play a role in the investigation into the Ukrainian International Airlines crash, officials said.
- Britain’s ambassador to Iran said UK travel advice to Iran has changed and all British nationals are advised against all travel there. The advice adds: “If you’re in Iran, you should review your departure options and consider leaving the country.”
- Iranian officials have rejected western intelligence assessments that the Ukrainian airliner was shot down accidentally by an Iranian anti-aircraft missile. A spokesman for the Iranian government went on to blame what he described as a “US psychological operation”.
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'Serious concerns' raised over integrity of crash site
Graham Braithwaite, professor of safety and accident investigation at Cranfield University, has said the Iranian handling of the crash site, including the apparent quick removal of evidence, raised “serious concerns over the integrity of the investigation”.
“Where you have flight recorders that tell you what has happened you can move quickly to clearing the site,” he said. “But if the recorders are damaged [as the Iranians have said] then all you have is the forensic evidence at the site to tell you the story.”
Photographs taken the day of the crash showed heavy machinery being used to move larger pieces of debris. Iranian media outlets also published several photos and videos of the wide field of wreckage and personal belongings left by the crash.
It was unclear whether the removal of the debris was done in accordance with crash-investigations procedures to ensure important evidence is preserved.
Braithwaite, who teaches a course in air accident investigations, said he was surprised that the Iranians had moved to clear the crash site before other interested parties, including Ukrainian, Canadian and other technical investigators had been able to make their own examination, which he said he would have been expected under annex 13 of the Chicago convention, the international agreement that sets out protocols for crash inquiries.
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Ukraine's president says he is grateful for US support
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, met to discuss the plane crash this afternoon.
A US statement said Pompeo offered the Ukrainian leader “condolences and full assistance in the ongoing investigation” into the crash of the jetliner.
Spoke with Ukrainian President @ZelenskyyUa to express my deepest condolences for the lives lost in the tragic crash of Ukrainian International Airlines flight 752. We stand with #Ukraine and are ready to offer our support and assistance in the ongoing investigation.
— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) January 10, 2020
Zelenskiy’s office said he briefed Pompeo about the progress in the probe, and they agreed the US politician would visit Ukraine later this month.
“Grateful for the condolences of the American people and valuable support of the US in investigating the causes of the plane crash,” Zelenskiy tweeted after the call. “Data from the United States contains important information to help with the investigation.”
Мав розмову з @SecPompeo. Вдячний за співчуття американського народу й цінну підтримку США у розслідуванні причин катастрофи. Дані, отримані від США, містять важливу інформацію, яка допоможе у розслідуванні.
— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) January 10, 2020
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Sweden’s transport agency has temporarily halted Iran Air flights between Sweden and Iran after the crash of a Ukrainian airliner near Tehran.
“The reason is the uncertainty around the accident and the security of civil aviation,” the agency said in a statement reported by Reuters.
Seven Swedish citizens and 17 people who lived in the country died in the crash.
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Iranian officials gave a press conference on Friday giving more details of their investigation and continuing to rebuff allegations the Ukrainian aircraft was shot down. “If [intelligence agencies] have findings with scientific support they should show this to the world,” Ali Abedzadeh, the head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation, told reporters.
He said he had watched a video clip purporting to show the plane being hit by a missile before crashing to the ground but said “this cannot be confirmed from a scientific perspective”.
He said the pilot had been in contact with the control tower two minutes before the accident, asking if he could ascend to 26,000 feet. After the fire broke out, the crew would have been consumed with “saving the plane”, he said, and so would not have been able to communicate further to explain what had gone wrong.
“We have to look for the cause of the fire,” Abedzadeh said.
Hassan Rezaeifar, the head of the committee that oversees aviation accidents in Iran, said that contrary to earlier claims that the black boxes appeared to have been damaged by the crash, both appeared to be intact.
“We prefer to extract the data and download the data inside the country,” he said. “But if we come to the conclusion that the data may be damaged then we will carry out the process [overseas].”
Investigators would attempt to extract and analyse the black box data on Friday, he added, but said the findings might take one or two months to be released.
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Iranian ambassador to UK: stop politicising crash inquiry
Hamid Baeidinejad, the Iranian ambassador to the UK, has urged the west – including the UK – to stop politicising the inquiry into the Ukraine plane crash by rushing to premature judgment about its causes without hard evidence. He said such judgments merely caused pain for the families of the bereaved, including many Iranians.
In an hour-long briefing, he also insisted that the Iranian government was allowing US government officials, as well as Boeing experts, to join the investigation in Tehran. He said: “We are fully committed to have a conclusive report on the reasons for the incident with experts on the ground from concerned countries.”
But he said he was “disappointed that some countries including the UK, which do not have hard evidence without access to the black box, the voice recordings, airplane wreckage and the technical engineers reports in Tehran airport, are rushing to judgment. That only adds to the anxiety of the families.”
He said it was not true that the crash site was being bulldozed, although the bodies, including Iranians, may be being collected from the site.
Baeidinejad promised a full transparent and technical report, pointing out that Iran wanted to know the cause of the crash as much as any other country. He added that the black box and voice recordings would now be available to the experts, saying some media reporting about refusing to give others access to the box was based on unsubstantiated claims.
He insisted no Iranian missile was triggered at the time the Ukrainian plane was taking off from the airport around 6am, adding that Tehran’s safety and security authorities were capable of distinguishing between a military and civilian aircraft. “The speed and height of a passenger airline is quite different from a missile or a fighter jet,” he claimed. He said the Iranian radar could distinguish any threat in the air.
“The plane was only 5 minutes in the air at 8,000 feet, and had requested permission to go to more than 20,000 feet. Our experts have announced that the plane was suffering a fire for more than a minute.”
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The Tass news agency has reported that one of Russia’s deputy foreign ministers, Sergei Ryabkov, said that Moscow had no grounds to blame Iran for the crash of a Ukrainian airliner near Tehran, contradicting statements by Canada’s prime minister and others.
Ryabkov called on senior world officials to refrain from public statements until more details were known about the causes of the crash.
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Germany’s Lufthansa airline says it and subsidiaries are cancelling flights to and from Tehran for the next 10 days as a precautionary measure, the Associated Press is reporting.
The airline said the decision was due to the “unclear security situation” for the airspace around Tehran airport after the crash of Ukraine International Airlines flight 752.
Other airlines have been making changes to avoid Iranian airspace. Alitalia, which hasn’t had flights to Iran since December 2018, says its flights to New Delhi and the Maldives were using alternate routes to those that usually fly over Iran and Iraq.
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The investigative journalism website Bellingcat is responding to reports that the site of the plane crash is being cleared by bulldozers by compiling an interactive map of the scene, using pictures and videos shared online.
Due to this, we @bellingcat are now working to place all images and videos of this site into an interactive map, so we do not lose vital information about what was where. https://t.co/uvvd1juZqu
— Nick Waters (@N_Waters89) January 10, 2020
Here’s a useful visual guide to what we know about the crashing of Ukraine International Airlines flight 752:
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Boris Johnson has spoken to the Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven and issued the following statement –
The prime minister spoke to Prime Minister Lövfen of Sweden.
The leaders expressed condolences to all those who lost loved ones on the Ukraine International Airlines flight – including from the UK and Sweden.
They agreed that there must now be a full, transparent investigation and committed to work closely together and with other international partners to ensure the families of the victims get the answers they deserve.
They also underlined the importance of the continued fight against the shared threat from Daesh [Isis] and urgent de-escalation in the region.
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Ukraine says US has shared 'important data'
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Vadym Prystaiko, has said on Twitter that he and the Ukrainian president had met US embassy officials and obtained important data about the plane crash.
Prystaiko gave no further details but said the data would be “processed by our specialists”.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian president, is due to discuss the investigation with Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, this afternoon.
Разом з Президентом Володимиром Зеленським зустрілися з представниками США, зокрема із керівницею Посольства в Україні Крістіною Квін. Отримали важливі дані, які будуть опрацьовані нашими фахівцями. Очікуємо розмови @ZelenskyyUa з Держсекретарем США @SecPompeo о 15:00.
— Vadym Prystaiko (@VPrystaiko) January 10, 2020
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The Iran crisis is being followed closely in Germany. Three of the victims of the Ukraine airlines crash were German citizens, including Paniz Soltani, a 29-year-old scientist of Iranian-German citizenship, who worked at the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, and a 30-year-old woman of German-Afghan nationality and her children, eight and five, from the state of North Rhine Westphalia.
The national airline, Lufthansa, has cancelled all flights to and from Tehran until further notice. On Thursday night it ordered a plane from Frankfurt to Tehran to turn back as reports emerged that the crash had been caused by an Iranian missile. A spokeswoman for Lufthansa said: “Lufthansa flights from and to Teheran have been cancelled as a precaution.” She did not say when the ban would be lifted.
The German government, keen to keep alive the fragile Iran nuclear deal framework, has been cautious not to be seen to support what is widely viewed in Germany as the Trump administration’s belligerent and provocative approach towards Iran after the killing of Quassem Suleimani. But Heiko Mass, the German foreign minister, has said the death was hardly surprising given that Suleimani “has drawn a trail of blood and violence throughout the Middle East”. It was for that reason that he was on the EU’s terrorist list, he said.
But critics in Germany who fear the government has taken a hitherto over-friendly stance towards Iran, have said the government should be looking closer to home, voicing concern over the influence of supporters loyal to the current Iranian regime living in Germany.
In particular, attention is being focused on a mosque in Hamburg where worshippers have been gathering in the past few days to publicly mourn the death of Suleimani.
The Imam Ali Mosque situated on the Alster river in the northern port city held a memorial service, as it stated: “in honour of Suleimani and the nine additional victims” of the US drone attack, last Sunday as well as holding subsequent events to mourn his passing.
Reporting on the services, Der Spiegel said that Hamburg’s Social Democrat-Green coalition government has been urged by critics from the Christian Democrats, the pro-business FDP and the rightwing populist AfD, to cease its six-year state cooperation with the IZH, the Islamic Centre of Hamburg, which is responsible for the running of the mosque, amid concern over its growing political influence.
The public homage being paid to Suleimani, says Spiegel, “is acting like dynamite in the debate about the correct way to deal with political Islam in Germany”. But the Hamburg senate has said it has no plans to break the cooperation, which it claimed “offers important chances for the development of the relationship between the city and the Islamic communities and as a whole for the better integration of Muslims”.
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Elizabeth Palmer from CBS News has tweeted this picture of the crash site. She says most of the wreckage has been cleared away and there is no security at the site.
CBS crew just visited the #Ukrainian airlines crash site west of Tehran. Nine am local time. Virtually all pieces of the plane were removed yesterday - say locals. Scavengers now picking site clean. No security. Not cordoned off. No sign of any investigators. pic.twitter.com/hhNJyokhjq
— Elizabeth Palmer (@elizapalmer) January 10, 2020
Hamed Esmaeilion, whose wife and daughter were killed in the Iran plane crash (see this earlier post), has shared this video of 9-year-old Reera Esmaeilion playing the piano.
The father of 9-year-old Reera Esmaeilion, one of the victims of flight #PS752 published this video of his late daughter playing the piano in Canada. Hamed also lost his dentist wife, Dr. Parisa Eghbalian, in the #Iran plane shoot down that killed 176. pic.twitter.com/S12Ku4n5ED
— Iran News Wire (@IranNW) January 10, 2020
The head of Iran’s civil aviation body has told reporters that authorities are examining the contents of flight 752’s black box today at a laboratory at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport.
The will attempt to assess whether it is possible to reconstruct and analyse the information inside the country, according to Iran’s Irna news agency.
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A British-Iranian woman jailed in Iran has had panic attacks since tensions between the country and the US escalated, her husband has said.
Richard Ratcliffe said the fallout from Donald Trump’s assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani was taking a toll on the mental health of his wife, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been detained since 2016 after she was arrested on espionage charges and jailed for five years.
She is among up to five people with dual British-Iranian nationality, or with UK connections, believed to be in prison in Iran. Their families have said they are being held as collateral and that the heightened tensions have made it harder to secure their release.
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Iraq’s top Shia Muslim cleric has condemned mutual US and Iranian attacks on Iraqi soil and warned of deteriorating security in the country and wider region as a result of Washington’s standoff with Tehran.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani said the attacks were a violation of sovereignty and that no foreign powers should be allowed to decide Iraq’s fate.
Sistani delivered his message through a representative who spoke at Friday prayer in the holy city of Kerbala, Reuters reported.
“The use of over-the-top methods by different sides which possess power and influence ... will only entrench the crisis and prevent a solution,” the representative said. “The latest dangerous aggressive acts, which are repeated violations of Iraqi sovereignty, are a part of the deteriorating situation [in the region].”
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Canada is “paying for past decisions” – namely a decision by Canada’s previous Conservative administration to sever ties with Tehran and upheld by Justin Trudeau’s government – asserts a piece in the Toronto Star.
Like other news outlets in Canada, which was the end destination of 138 people on the Ukraine International Airlines flight, the Star leads with developments including the news that Canada’s federal transportation safety agency has accepted an invitation from Iran to send officials to the site.
But the newspaper adds that without an official relationship, Canada must rely on Italy to secure applications and coordinate diplomacy with Tehran.
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The perception that the threat of war in the middle east has receded caused oil to slip towards $65 a barrel today as investors also focused on rising US inventories.
Crude is now below where it was before a U.S. drone strike killed Iranian general Qassem Suleimani on 3 January.
For more on that, my colleague Kalyeena Makortoff is running a business liveblog here.
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French experts to play role in crash investigation
France’s BEA air accident agency has said it would be involved in the investigation into a Ukrainian airliner crash in Iran.
“We have been notified of the event by Iran and we have designated an accredited representative to the safety investigation,” a BEA spokesman said.
“No further assistance has been requested at this point in time,” he added.
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Airstrikes by unidentified planes on Syrian targets
Airstrikes carried out by unidentified planes in the Syrian province of Deir Ezzor overnight killed at least eight members of an Iranian-backed militia, according to monitors.
Several planes targeted positions belonging to the Iraqi Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary group in Bukamal, near the border with Iraq, in the early hours of Friday, both local media and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The attack, which occurs against the backdrop of soaring tensions across the region between the US and Iran, was most likely carried out by Israel, Iraqi officials said, without offering evidence.
Israel regularly carries out airstrikes inside Syria targeting Iranian assets but does not normally comment on its military activity in the neighbouring nine-year-old civil war.
The same area was also targeted by the US on 29 December in strikes which killed 25 members of a pro-Iran Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah in retaliation for a rocket attack on a military base in Iraq that killed a US military contractor as tensions escalated between Washington and Tehran over the last two weeks.
Weapons depots and vehicles were targeted, causing several huge explosions, the UK-based Observatory said. Deir Ezzor 24 and Sound and Pictures, activist collectives in the area, also said the planes had struck trucks carrying weapons and depots for ballistic missiles near the town.
The area struck Friday is a key land corridor for Tehran that links Iran across Iraq and Syria through Lebanon.
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UK advises British nationals against all travel to Iran
Britain’s ambassador to Iran has been on Twitter pointing out that UK travel advice to Iran has changed and all British nationals are advised against all travel there.
The advice adds: “If you’re in Iran, you should review your departure options and consider leaving the country.”
UK Travel Advice to Iran has changed. The UK now advises all British nationals against all travel to Iran. Additionally the FCO advise against all air travel to, from and within Iran. We recommend British nationals subscribe to
— Rob Macaire (@HMATehran) January 10, 2020
our travel advice to be notified when it changes
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In Germany, Lufthansa has confirmed that one of its flight to Tehran was ordered yesterday to turn back to Germany, amid security concerns, after the emergence of the missile attack allegations.
It followed the airline’s lifting of a flight ban to Tehran-bound aircraft, after one day.
Lufthansa flight to Tehran turns around and heads back to Germany amid the news that Iran shot down a Ukrainian airliner.
— Henry Jones (@hthjones) January 9, 2020
Smart move... pic.twitter.com/WazctyMXWP
Iran continues to deny the assessments of western intelligence agencies that its force shot down the Ukrainian passenger jet in the tense early hours on Wednesday morning.
Ali Abedzadeh, the head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation, said overnight: “At the time this plane was in the air, there were several other internal and international flights flying at 8000 feet and the suggestion it was targeted by a missile cannot be correct.”
Flight records show there was some domestic traffic around the same time at the Mehrabad Airport, about 35km north-east of Imam Khomeini International airport.
Flight records available online show there were no other flights landing or taking off from Imam Khomeini International airport around the same as the Ukrainian plane was in flight.
Hassan Rezaeifar, the head of the committee that oversees aviation accidents in Iran, said “nowhere in the world” would it be possible to determine the cause of a crash this soon. “Not only haven’t we found evidence to prove the claim [of a missile strike] but we’ve found evidence to reject it,” he said, likely referring to claims by Iranian investigators that the Ukrainian flight attempted to turn around and return to the airport before it went down.
He said he was open to international involvement in the probe, including American, but added - likely in reference to sanctions that prevent US involvement with Iran - that they “should get the authority from their Senate”.
The terrible human tragedy at the centre of the incident is laid bare in reports which are detailing how the flight was carrying entire families, university students, and a young couple who had traveled back to Iran for their wedding.
Arash Pourzarabi, 26, and Pouneh Gourji, 25, who were graduate students in computer science at the University of Alberta, had gone to Iran for their wedding, according to Reza Akbari, president of the Iranian Heritage Society of Edmonton.
They were on the plane with four members of their wedding party and 24 other Iranian-Canadians from Edmonton, Akbari said.
“Oh God, I can’t believe this,” Akbari told Reuters.
“It’s shocking to the whole community.”
Borna Ghotbi, a close friend of the newlyweds since they were all undergraduates at Tehran’s Sharif University, said their wedding took place three days ago.
Another couple, Siavash Ghafouri Azar and Sara Mamani, had also just married in Iran, according to a Montreal university professor who taught Azar. The couple, both engineers, had just bought a house in a Montreal suburb.
Negar Mortazavi, Iranian-American journalist, has tweeted this interview with Hamed Esmaeilion, whose wife Parisa and their daughter Reera were killed in the crash.
Hamed Esmaeilion says his wife Parisa and with their daughter Reera were killed in the Ukrainian flight that crashed in #Iran last night: I called her school today and said Reera will be absent forever.pic.twitter.com/a11dPAyL0S
— Negar Mortazavi (@NegarMortazavi) January 9, 2020
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France has said this morning that it is ready to join the investigating into the crash of a Ukrainian airliner.
“It is important that as much clarity as possible is made and as quickly as possible,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian was quoted by Reuters as saying.
Last year, the French agency BEA helped analyse data from the flight recorder of a crashed Boeing plane in Ethiopia.
Ukraine: not ruling out missile strike
In a Facebook post this morning the Ukrainian president says he is not ruling out the possibility that the plane which crashed earlier this week in Iran had been hit a by a missile.
“The missile theory is not ruled out, but it has not been confirmed yet,” Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in the post.
Zelenskiy reiterated his call for “all international partners” the U.S., Britain and Canada in particular to share data and evidence relevant to the crash.
The head of Iran’s investigation team into the plane crash has told state television that Tehran will use expert help from Russia, Ukraine, France and Canada if we cannot recover data from the plane’s recorders.
Hassan Rezaeifar said today that recovering the data could take more than one month and the entire investigation into the crash could take more than one year.
He also said the flight had been delayed by about an hour because the pilot decided to unload part of the luggage as the flight was overweight.
It’s believed the US system that detected the missile launches that brought down the Ukrainian passenger jet is the Space Based Infrared System, a network of around ten satellites operated by the US Air Force’s Space Command first launched in 2011.
The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont adds that the system was designed specifically to detect launches of missiles, including missile tests by countries like North Korea, and relies on detecting the infrared end of the spectrum.
Specifically the system is designed to be able to detect strategic and short range ballistic missile launches, determine their flight trajectory, and provide a location for where the missile will hit, pretty much what the US and its allies are claiming.
Oleksandr Danylyuk, the former head of Ukraine’s national security and defence council, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the US side should have enough intelligence in the region to be back up assertions that the flight was shot down.
He added: “It looked very suspicious early. It was a relatively new plane with very experienced crew. What I was very suspicious about was that quite quickly from the Iranian side there was a position that it was not a terrorist attack or shooting down but a technical failure.”
The investigative journalism website Bellingcat has geolocated the location of one of a number of videos that have emerged showing the moment of a possible missile strike on the plane.
The video - which posted onto a public Telegram channel - has been geolocated to a residential area in Parand (coordinates 35.489414, 50.906917), a suburb to the west of Imam Khomeini International Airport, according to the website.
Bellingcat notes that it is unclear why the person holding the camera was filming at the time, but it was possible that there were two missiles.
We've geolocated newly-discovered footage showing an apparent missile strike on #PS752 to a suburb west of Tehran.https://t.co/dzDiYTKWzS
— Bellingcat (@bellingcat) January 9, 2020
A number of media outlets report that Iran had turned on its missile defence system to protect itself after it fired 22 missiles at American bases in Iraq in retaliation for the US killing last week in Iraq of the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani.
The system, however, mistook Flight 752 for a threat and shot it down, Newsweek reports, quoting a senior US intelligence official.
US media outlets have also quoted officials saying their satellites had identified the signature of an Iranian anti-aircraft battery being activated shortly before the aircraft went down a few minutes after taking off at 6.13am on Wednesday morning.
The US officials said they had identified infrared signals from two suspected missiles, followed shortly afterwards by an infrared blip from the burning aircraft.
Public suspicions that the Boeing 737-800 may have accidentally been shot down had grown throughout Thursday based on images circulating on social media showing what appeared to be missile debris that was purportedly photographed near the crash site.
These are the two images of what looks like a missile head near the crash site, first shared by that US-based opposition figure who said had received them from someone inside Iran. Those images definitely look like they were taken on an Iran street, but we don't know where/when pic.twitter.com/YrHEsuv3zb
— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) January 9, 2020
Iran blames "US psychological operation"
Iranian officials have rejected the western intelligence assessments.
“Scientifically, it is impossible that a missile hit the Ukrainian plane, and such rumours are illogical,” said Ali Abedzadeh, the head of Iran’s of Civil Aviation Organisation.
A spokesman for the Iranian government, Ali Rabiei, went on in a statement today to blame what he described as a “US psychological operation.”
Iran’s Press TV quotes him as saying:
“It is unfortunate that the psychological operation of the US government, and those supporting it knowingly and unknowingly, are adding insult to the injury of the bereaved families and victimising them for certain goals by propagating such fallacies,” the senior Iranian official pointed out.
Meanwhile, a new video has emerged which appears to show the moment a Ukrainian passenger jet was shot down in Iran.
Originally obtained by the New York Times, the phone footage shows a tiny spec suddenly exploding.
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The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has vowed to find answers over crash that killed 176 people, including 63 Canadians, and has also cited intelligence reports casting the incident in a new light.
“We have intelligence, including from our allies and own intelligence that the plane was shot down by Iranian surface-to-air missiles,” Trudeau said.
“Canadians want answers. That means transparency, accountability and justice.”
Western agencies are understood to have picked up signals of the missile launches followed by the traces of an explosion.
A British source told the Guardian: “The assessment is that it looks like it is a tragic accident.”
In a statement on Thursday night, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: “There is now a body of information that the flight was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile. This may well have been unintentional. We are working closely with Canada and our international partners and there now needs to be a full, transparent investigation.”
Submit data and evidence on crash cause, Ukraine tells US
Good morning and welcome to the Guardian’s live blog coverage of the terrible loss of life after a Ukrainian passenger aircraft crashed shortly after taking off from Tehran - and the new development in the form of claims by western security officials that it was accidentally shot down by an Iranian anti-aircraft missile.
Intelligence have sources told the Guardian their assessments suggest two surface-to-air missiles had targeted the Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 that went down in Iran on Wednesday morning, killing all 176 people onboard.
Iran was inviting experts from Boeing, the jetliner’s manufacturer, to join the investigation into the crash, the Iranian official news agency IRNA said on Friday, while the US National Transportation Safety Board said it had received “formal notification” of the crash from Iran and had designated a representative to the crash inquiry.
On Friday morning the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy called on “international partners” to share any information they had on the crash.
Zelenskiy also said he would discuss the investigation with US secretary of state Mike Pompeo later on Friday.
“The version about a missile hitting a plane is not ruled out, but it has not been confirmed yet,” Zelenskiy said on Facebook. “Given the recent statements by the leaders of the states in the media, we call on all international partners - notably the governments of the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom - to submit data and evidence concerning the disaster to the commission which investigates the causes.”
You can reach here here on Twitter if you want to flag up news developments on this.
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