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borgslayer
Rear Admiral
Joined: 27 Aug 2003
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Location: Las Vegas
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 Tue Feb 01, 2005 10:17 pm Video 'shows UK plane crash' |
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Islamic militant group says it shot down plane
LONDON, England (CNN) -- U.S. and British investigators were seeking the cause of a deadly crash of a Royal Air Force C-130 Hercules transport plane as two separate claims of responsibility surfaced -- one including video of what appeared to be the aircraft's wreckage.
The nine Royal Air Force personnel and one soldier on board the aircraft died, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense said Tuesday. They had previously been reported missing and presumed dead.
Nine RAF service members and a soldier on board the aircraft died, a defence ministry spokesman said Tuesday. Previously they had been reported missing and presumed dead.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said it was still unclear what caused the crash.
"Let me again express my sympathy and condolences to the families of those that have died," Blair told the ITV television station Tuesday.
"We don't yet know the exact cause of the crash. We hope we will be able to give people more details of that in due course."
Britain's Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, said late Monday a senior investigator was on his way to Iraq.
"I am aware that there is a great deal of speculation about what caused that crash, not least because of the video, purporting to be of a missile shooting down an aircraft," Stirrup told Sky News TV.
"We all want to know what caused it and we all want to know that as quickly as we can, but we have to find out the facts. We have set up an investigation to look into it," he said.
"We will go through it painstakingly, but this is going to take some time."
British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon acknowledged reports the plane may have been shot down but added that "we are not in a position to come to any conclusions until the investigation is complete."
Neither of the two claims of responsibility has been authenticated. The first, a statement purporting to be from the well-known group Ansar al-Islam, appeared on an Islamic Web site Monday.
The statement said the group's fighters tracked the aircraft and "fired an anti-tank missile at it," downing it.
The second claim appeared in the form of a videotape aired on the Arab-language network Al-Jazeera.
The video shows two missiles streaking into the sky followed by a fireball on the ground. After that segment, the video shows close-up views of wreckage on the ground, some burning, of what appears to be a C-130.
The final shot shows heavy black smoke in the distance, apparently shot from a moving vehicle.
The logo of another known group, the Islamic National Resistance, 20th Revolution Brigades, appears in the corner of the video.
The Associated Press quoted a spokesman for al-Jazeera as saying the network received the video from a group that called itself "the Green Brigade," part of the "the 1920 Revolution Brigade, a military wing of the National Islamic Resistance in Iraq."
Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Don Shepherd, a CNN military analyst, said pieces of the wreckage appeared to be from a C-130, but that the missile firing appeared suspect.
Shepherd said both missiles flew smoothly through the air, which would require a radar-locking system that would be difficult to transport and set up.
The alternative, a heat-seeking missile, would corkscrew through the sky toward a target, he said.
In Washington, military officials told CNN they do not know the official cause of the crash but that they are not ruling out enemy fire. Military sources told CNN that military personnel reported seeing a fireball in the sky before the crash.
U.S. military officials said widespread wreckage was visible at the crash site, about 25 miles north of Baghdad near Balad. Hoon said the plane had been on a flight from Baghdad International Airport to the airbase at Balad.
Hoon said British and U.S. forces "are recovering the bodies and attempting to ascertain the cause of the crash."
The plane went down at about 5:25 p.m. Sunday, nearly a half hour after polls closed on Iraq's first free elections in half a century.
"The deaths of these servicemen are especially poignant on a day when Iraqis were able to enjoy the freedom of democratic elections for the first time in many years," Hoon said.
It was the worst single loss of life for British forces since the war began. Seventy-six Britons had died in Iraq prior to the crash.
The highest previous UK death toll from a single incident in Iraq was eight British servicemembers, killed in a helicopter crash in which four Americans also died in March 2003.
Among the dead was Australian-born Flight Lt. Paul Pardoel, 35, a father of three, who was the navigator of the downed aircraft.
Pardoel had dual Australian-British nationality and had been living in England for three years with his wife Kellie and their children.
The former Royal Australian Air Force officer is Australia's first military casualty of the Iraq war.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard has expressed his sympathies to Pardoel's family and to all the families of the British servicemen killed.
The other men killed included RAF Squadron Leader Patrick Marshall, 39; Flight Lt. David Stead, 35; Flight Lt. Andrew Smith, 25; Master Engineer Gary Nicholson, 42; Chief Technician Richard Brown, 40; Flight Sgt. Mark Gibson, 34; Sgt. Robert O'Connor, 38; and Cpl. David Williams, 37. The tenth man, a soldier, was Acting Lance Cpl. Steven Jones, 25, who served with the Royal Signals.
CNN Pentagon Correspondent Barbara Starr contributed to this report.
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http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/02/01/iraq.britishplane/index.html
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Republican_Man
STV's Premier Conservative
Joined: 26 Mar 2004
Posts: 14823
Location: Classified
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| Tue Feb 01, 2005 11:31 pm |
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Don't believe it's authentic.
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"Rights are only as good as the willingness of some to exercise responsibility for those rights- Fmr. Colorado Senate Pres. John Andrews
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