Leit_Wolf/iStock(WASHINGTON) — The Ukrainian passenger plane that crashed Wednesday morning in Iraq, killing all 176 onboard, was “highly likely” shot down by Iran, a U.S. official told ABC News.
According to the U.S. official, U.S. intelligence is confident that Iran painted the Ukrainian airliner with radar and fired two surface to air missiles that brought down the aircraft.
The crash occurred about three hours after Iran fired multiple missiles into Iraq, targeting U.S. military sites in what appeared to be retaliation for the recent American drone strike that killed one of Iran’s top generals.
Iranian officials were quick to blame the crash on a technical problem and rejected that it could have been struck by a missile.
“The engine had caught fire. If the reason of the crash was missile, then it would explode in the sky. But the fire was in the plane engine and the pilot’s attempt to control the plane was unsuccessful,” Qassim Biniaz, a communications chief at the Iranian Ministry of Roads and Transport, told the state news agency IRN shortly after the crash.
Ukraine’s embassy in Tehran initially issued a statement confirming the Iranian version of events but then deleted it. Ukrainian officials later said it was too early to rule anything out.
Iranian investigators on Wednesday said they had recovered the plane’s “black box” flight recorder and were studying it. Iran released a preliminary report suggesting the plane had crashed while attempting to turn back toward the airport to make an emergency landing.
According to FlightRadar24, the Boeing 737-800 airliner bound for Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, took off at 6:12 a.m. from Tehran’s Imam Homeini International Airport. Data from the plane dropped off just two minutes into the flight and suggested something catastrophic occurred.
Footage aired on Iranian television and released by the Iranian Red Crescent showed the plane’s wreckage scattered across a field in small fragments.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko said 82 Iranians and 68 Canadians died in the crash. Eleven Ukrainians were killed, among them the airliner’s nine crew members, he said. Ten other passengers were from Sweden, four from Afghanistan, three from Germany and three from Britain, according to Prystaiko. At least 16 passengers were children under the age of 10.
Wednesday’s crash was the first fatal one for Ukraine International Airlines.
People were quick to draw comparisons to the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 which was hit by a Russian-made missile while it was traveling over Ukraine in 2014.
Copyright © 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.