In my recent in-depth post on the downing of Ukrainian Air flight 752, I pointed out the very strange anomaly that Iranian air defense radar systems reportedly identified several incoming cruise missiles shortly before the airliner was shot down, despite a lack of any such cruise missiles actually entering Iranian air space. These false alerts appear to have led directly to the misidentification of the civilian airliner as one of these cruise missiles and its subsequent unintentional downing. I suggested that one potential explanation to explain this anomaly was that the US or Israel hacked into the air defense radar system, and somehow caused it to display incoming ‘cruise missiles’ which were in reality not present.
It appears that Iran is thinking this, too, for they are now investigating just such a scenario. On Tuesday, the deputy commander of the Armed Forces General Headquarters for coordination affairs, Ali Abdollahi, announced that a team had been established to investigate the possible disruption in Iran’s radar network by the US which could have caused the operator mistaking the Ukrainian passenger plan for an incoming American cruise missile, Tehran Times reported on January 15th.
“The U.S. mischiefs in the region have been proven before, and so far Iran’s cyber systems have observed and recorded virtual objects manufactured by the U.S. in the country’s airspace.”
“Disruption in performance of radar systems by the United States is not unprecedented,” the military official told national TV.
Indeed, just last June it was reported that:
“President Trump approved an offensive cyber strike that disabled computer systems used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to control rocket and missile launches.”
But that’s probably not relevant to this situation at all...
Forbes goes on to explain that:
If, however, the reports are true and the U.S. has compromised Iran’s networks to the extent that Teheran’s core command and control systems are now vulnerable, that changes the dynamics completely.
The NY Times had previously reported that the Trump Administration had “accelerated a secret American program to sabotage Iran’s missiles and rockets.”
And in September the Middle East Monitor reported that the commander in chief of the IRGC, Ayatollah Khamenei “now suspects possible cooperation between Russia and Israel, particularly a scenario in which the Russians gave Israel the secret code to access the S-300 radars within Iran.”
Wikileaks had previously revealed that Russia gave Israel the codes to Iran’s Tor-M1 system, the very missile system reportedly used to down the Ukrainian airliner.
Even before this statement by the Iranian military commander expressing doubt that this accident was entirely ‘unintentional’, the University of Tehran Cyperspace Research Lab had ‘ruled out human error’. Citna News Agency reported the University’s conclusion:
On the matter of the Ukrainian plane accident in Iran, the role of human error has been ruled out [as it has been discovered that] deception operations were carried out on the air control & command system. If confirmed, the responsibility for this tragic accident lies directly with the criminal American government.
It seems the theory of US or Israeli interference causing this ‘unintentional’ shoot-down, via a sophisticated cyberattack against Iranian air defense systems, is beginning to gain traction in the country.
This really shouldn’t be surprising, considering many common Iranians don’t buy into the official Iranian version of the story either, and suspect foreign interference of some kind as they are asking the very same questions we ‘conspiracy theorists’ in the west have been asking. Questions the official versions of the story don’t answer.
Interview with an Iranian student below, from the Gray Zone - Iran plane crash: who do Iranians blame? -