Surveillance video from Iran circulating on social media Tuesday appears to show two missiles hitting the Ukrainian passenger jet downed over Tehran, fired approximately 30 seconds apart, providing new information about the tragedy that killed 176 people on the plane, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The video was verified by Storyful, a social-media-intelligence company owned by News Corp, parent of Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones. It raises new questions about how forthcoming Iranian authorities were when, after three days of denial, they admitted they had mistakenly struck the Ukraine International Airlines flight without mentioning a second missile.
The video also possibly answers the question of why the Ukrainian airliner’s transponder stopped working before being hit by the missile that apparently brought the jet down last week.
The blurry video shows what appears to be a missile launched from a site near the airport, and hitting an object in the sky, presumably the plane. About 30 seconds later, a second missile is fired, which hits the plane, this time a little closer to the airport. The jet stays in the air for several minutes and bursts into flames.
The plane appears to circle back toward Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport before crashing roughly 20 miles from it. A U.S. official identified the weapon used as a Russian-made SA-15 surface-to-air missile system, also known as the Gauntlet.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on Saturday admitted it had mistakenly shot the plane down, something Western governments had claimed, taking full responsibility and promising accountability for the perpetrators and compensation for the victims.
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