Iran has admitted to shooting down a Boeing 737-800 Ukrainian jet with two missiles fired from an Iranian air defense system by mistake on Wednesday morning, killing at least 176 people on board.
A number of passenger jets that were shot down, whether accidentally or, in some cases, deliberately during the last forty years. Here are details.
July 17, 2014
Malaysian Boeing 777 jet was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, when it was blown out of the sky over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people. In June, an international investigative team charged four people, including three with ties to Russian intelligence.
Moscow has consistently denied any involvement in the disaster, but Western countries and experts have blamed Russian-backed separatists.
March 23, 2007
A Soviet-made Ilyushin airliner belonging to the Belarusian Airlines was shot down by a missile shortly after takeoff over Somali, which was witnessing a civil war, killing 11 people on board.
The plane was carrying a team of Belarusian engineers and technologists who went to Somalia to repair a plane hit by a missile two weeks before that date.
Oct. 4, 2001
Seventy-eight people, most of them Russian émigrés to Israel, died when the flight from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk exploded and plunged into the Black Sea off the Russian coast.
Four minutes earlier, two long-range antiaircraft missiles were fired during a Ukrainian air defense exercise off the Black Sea’s Crimean coast. Ukraine’s president later said that he accepted investigators’ finding that his country’s military had accidentally destroyed the Russian airliner.
July 3, 1988
A United States Navy warship in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian passenger plane that the Navy said it mistook for a jet fighter, killing all 290 people on board. The Iran Air Airbus A300 was flying over the Strait of Hormuz while the warship, the Vincennes, a 9,600-ton missile cruiser, was being engaged by Iranian gunboats.
The Americans, who were following radar readings, wrongly thought they saw a hostile F-14 jet fighter and downed the plane with a surface-to-air missile.
Sept. 1, 1983
A Soviet fighter jet shot down KAL 007 after the airliner strayed off course and over Soviet territory, killing 269 passengers and crew members and prompting several theories.
The Soviet Union contended the jet was on a spying mission, which the United States denied. The United States, Japan, and the Soviet Union searched the Sea of Okhotsk for the black box recorder but said they were unable to find it.
The episode evoked the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 902 in 1978, which had a different fate: All but two passengers on that flight survived.
June 27, 1980
The crash of Italia Flight 870, known as the Ustica affair, killed all 81 people aboard and produced legions of conspiracy theories in Italy. The airliner was entering the final leg of a routine trip from Bologna, Italy, to Palermo, Sicily, when it suddenly plunged into the Tyrrhenian Sea near the small island of Ustica.
In 2013, Italy’s highest court ruled that the government had to compensate the families of some of the victims, implicitly acknowledging the most widely accepted theory behind the crash: that a missile fired by a warplane had hit the twin-engine McDonnell Douglas DC-9. The court did not say where that missile came from.
Feb. 21, 1973:
A Boeing 727-200 en route from Tripoli, Libya, to Cairo via Benghazi, Libya, was shot down by Israeli fighter aircraft over the Sinai Desert. Just five of the 113 passengers survived.
Israel said that the plane had flown over Israeli military concentrations along the Suez Canal and over a military airfield in Sinai, which was then occupied by Israel, which claimed it downed the plane to thwart a possible act of terrorism.
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