U.S. Intel Sources Conclude Passenger Plane Shot Down By Iranian Missile

By Aliza Worthington — January 9, 2020

U.S. intelligence sources are saying the Ukrainian jetliner that crashed Tuesday night, killing all 176 passengers onboard, was shot down by Iranian missiles. According to Major Garrett, of CBS News:

GARRETT: U.S. officials are confident that Iran shot down a Ukrainian jetliner in the hours after the Iranian missile attack on U.S. targets. 176 people were killed, including at least 63 Canadians. This information is based on U.S. intelligence, which sources say picked up signals of a radar being turned on. U.S. satellites also detected, we are told, two missile launches, which happened shortly before the plane exploded.

U.S. investigators have not yet seen the information in the Black Box, nor have they been to the site to investigate, but Jeremy Bash told Andrea Mitchell that their radar and aviation systems may have "picked up Iranian anti-aircraft activity on that same night." The tragic irony, of course, is that these passengers — many of them students, many of them Iranians, families, non-combatants — would be alive had Trump not recklessly decided to assassinate Qasem Soleimani. Iran wouldn't have felt compelled to respond with a face-saving attack on our military bases, triggering the high-alert of ALL the militaries in the region.

Furthermore, according to Ali Arouzi, an MSNBC reporter on the ground in Iran, Iranians will go out of their way to deny any responsibility for this plane crash.

AROUZI: Iranians are going to be very, very upset about this. They're going to say that they're being framed again for something they haven't done from the very beginning they were saying this was an accident. There were no rockets fired from Iran. They've been refuting all the claims that have been swirling around in this sort of rumor mill that a rocket or bomb went off on the plane. They said they had some of their most highly prized students on board that plane and why would they shoot it down?

Jeremy Bash emphasized that these are the dangers that come from escalating military actions, and warned that this is not over by any stretch of the imagination.

BASH: I think what this all points up to, Andrea, is that during the fog of war, when there's an exchange of fire, terrible things can unfold. And what happened here is that we came to the brink of a military conflict, and I don't believe we're out of the woods yet, because Iran will turn to its surrogates and proxies, it's terrorist cells, it's cyberattacks, and we remain at a very dangerous moment here.

All is, most definitely, not well.

UPDATE: The missile was Iranian-owned, but Russian-made:

BREAKING: The Ukrainian jetliner was shot down by two Russian made surface to air missiles (SA-15), according to a US official familiar with the intelligence. The U.S. saw Iranian radar signals lock onto the jetliner, before it was shot down.

—@barbarastarrcnn reports

— Josh Campbell (@joshscampbell) January 9, 2020

Explore more

Discussion

We welcome relevant, respectful comments. Any comments that are sexist or in any other way deemed hateful by our staff will be deleted and constitute grounds for a ban from posting on the site. Please refer to our Terms of Service for information on our posting policy.