Pentagon Accuses Iran Of Shooting Down A Ukrainian Plane But Its Evidence Is Flimsy

moon of alabama

The Pentagon is accusing Iran's air defense of shooting down the Ukraninan plane that crashed yesterday near Tehran. The Pentagon says that it was an accidental incident. But the evidence on which the claim is based is flimsy.

We reported yesterday on flight PS752:

Hours after Iran had launched the missiles a Ukrainian airliner crashed three minutes after it had taken off from Tehran airport. All 176 people on board died. The passengers were mostly from Iran, Canada and the Ukraine. The airplane was a three years old Boeing 737-800 NG operated by Ukrainian International Airlines, the country's flag carrier. Video shows the burning airliner coming down on a glide path. Photos from the crash site show shrapnel like impacts on the fuselage. The evidence is consistent with an uncontained turbine disc rupture but other potential causes can not be ruled out. The incident will be investigated like all other airliner crashes.

In the update we added:

Higher quality daylight pictures of the crashed Ukrainian plane show that at least some of the "shrapnel impact holes" are not holes at all but are debris or dirt lying on top of the aircraft pieces. Additional pictures also show no evidence of an externally induced event.
The Flight Data Recorders of the airplane were found. Iran will download the data from them or, if it does not have that capability, will ask some other country (France?, Germany?) to do so. A preliminary accident report will be published after one month.

Newsweek now reports:

The Ukrainian flight that crashed just outside the Iranian capital of Tehran was struck by an anti-aircraft missile system, a Pentagon official, a senior U.S. intelligence official and an Iraqi intelligence official told Newsweek.
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The aircraft is believed to have been struck by a Russia-built Tor-M1 surface-to-air missile system, known to NATO as Gauntlet, the three officials told Newsweek.Two Pentagon officials assess that the incident was accidental. Iran's anti-aircraft were likely active following the country's missile attack, which came in response to the U.S. killing last week of Revolutionary Guard Quds Force commander Major General Qassem Soleimani, sources said.

How would an Iraqi intelligence official, likely controlled by the CIA, know what happened in Tehran? The evidence the reporter notes is not very convincing:

Images began to circulate Wednesday of what appeared to be fragments of a Tor M-1 missile said to have been found in a suburb southwest of Tehran. Ukraine Security Council Secretary Oleksiy Danylov said Thursday in a statement that contact with a Tor M-1 system was among the potential causes for the plane's destruction that his country was looking into.Other potential scenarios involved a collision with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or another flying object, technical malfunction and a terrorist attack.

These are the two images in question:

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The left picture was posted yesterday at 17:50 UTC on Twitter by the Farsi and English tweeting account "Azematt".

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The second picture was posted by another Farsi and English tweeting account name "Liberalist_30" at 10:15 UTC today.

Both pictures show the navigation and steering head section of a 9k331 missile used in the Russian Tor M-1 anti-air system. (The warhead is behind the head section and explodes towards the sides of the missile. This leaves the head section intact.)

The Independent had already reported on the images and noted the problems with them:

Over the last day, at least two images of what appeared to be missile debris from Russian-made Tor missiles have appeared on social media. The photographs had not previously been uploaded to the internet before yesterday, but attempts to geolocate to the crash site have so far been unsuccessful. They may be unconnected.
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Elliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, the digital investigation group famous for their investigation into the downing of MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, confirmed that the photograph of Tor missile debris were new images as far as the internet was concerned. But writing on Twitter, he suggested independent verification may prove elusive.“There’s other examples of this type of debris documented in other conflicts, so there’s no way to know this is in Iran,” he said.

Even a blind chicken might find a corn. For once Higgens is right. There are certainly other pictures of used Tor missile heads available.

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There are also many Farsi/English Twitter accounts that are operated by the anti-Iranian MEK cult known for its cooperation with U.S. intelligence services. Whoever provided the pictures might have done so to falsely accuse Iran.

The Tor-M-1 (video) is a highly-mobile Russian-made system used for medium altitude anti-aircraft tasks. In 2007 Iran bought 29 Tor M-1 units from Russia. The Iranian Tor are operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC).

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It is likely that there are Tor systems around Tehran and it is certain that they were on high alert in the hours after Iran had launched missiles towards U.S. bases in Iraq.

But there were several flights out of Tehran in the early hours of January 8. The departure of flight PS752 was delayed. It took off at 6:12 local time. The airplane climbed out of Tehran airport in a rather straight line. The teams that man the Tor systems around Tehran must be used to the regular radar track of civil planes coming out of Tehran airport. That makes an accidental launch somewhat unlikely.

As the Independent also noted:

Early theories about the cause of the crash focussed on engine failure. On Wednesday evening, a Reuters report, citing five intelligence officers, said the western intelligence community was minded to believe technical malfunction was the most likely reason. Ukraine’s embassy in Iran initially sided this way, ruling out the possibility of a missile attack, before hastily removing the statement.

The Ukrainian plane had CFM 56 engines. These have in past years experienced uncontained failures. In April 2018 BBC reported:

A female passenger died after she was nearly sucked from the cabin of a Southwest Airlines flight travelling from New York to Dallas on Tuesday.
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An initial investigation found evidence of metal fatigue where a fan blade had broken off, according to the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).A similar incident was recorded in 2016 involving a Southwest flight that landed safely in Florida.

Uncontained engine failures can damage the tanks of an airplane and can set it on fire. They can also lead to all kinds of other damage. Any plane that survives such an incident is very lucky.

It is possible that an Iranian Tor system accidentally brought down the Ukrainian plane. It is also possible that it experienced an engine failure that ruptured the full fuel tanks and set it on fire. Something else like a bird strike may have cause engine damage. There are many other possibilities. We will have to wait for more evidence and for the results of the ongoing investigation to learn what really happened.

But there is one thing that we can say for sure. Two pictures of missile heads taken at an unknown location by unknown persons at an unknown time are not sufficient evidence for any accusations against Iran.

Posted by b on January 9, 2020 at 18:49 UTC | Permalink

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