Question Over ‘Shoot-Down’ Video
By Finian Cunningham
January 10, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - A mobile
phone video supposedly taken by an
amateur bystander in Tehran purports to
show the moment an Iranian air-defense
missile hits the doomed civilian
airliner.
The 19-second video was published by the New
York Times on January 9, the day after the fatal
crash in which all 176 people on board were
killed.
Flight PS752, a Boeing 737-800, took
off from Tehran’s Imam Khomenei airport at 6.12
am local time. About two minutes later while
flying over the Tehran suburb of Parand, the
aircraft became stricken and reportedly stopped
sending flight data. The jet flew for another
minute and a half before slamming into the
ground.
Another amateur video apparently taken from a
family car traveling on a motorway shows the plane
on fire before it crashes with a massive explosion.
From the crash site, it appears that the pilot was
trying to return the stricken jet to the airport.
This latter video seems a plausible random
observation since the plane is on fire and flying
for a lengthy time. We will return to the first
video in a moment.
Western intelligence agencies are claiming
that the airliner was struck by two surface-to-air
missiles fired by Iranian military. The claim has
been backed by Canadian prime minister Justin
Trudeau as well as British counterpart Boris
Johnson. It has been suggested that the Iranians may
have accidentally shot down the passenger plane
owing to the heightened tensions between the US and
Iran. Four hours before the air disaster, Iranian
ballistic missiles had attacked two US bases in Iraq
in revenge for the American drone assassination of
Major General Qassem Soleimani on January 3.
The implication is that the Iranian military were
on high alert following the attack on the US bases
and they may have mistaken the civilian airliner for
an incoming American warplane.
