The Russian Ministry of Defense on Friday said that Israeli air forces nearly shot down a passenger jetliner in Syria during a missile strike on the suburbs of Damascus a day earlier.
The allegation comes as tensions run high in Syria, where fighting has escalated in the northern province of Idlib. Syrian government forces, backed by the Russian military, have clashed with Turkish troops that support the opposition there after failing to observe a ceasefire.
A spokesman for the Israeli prime minister did not respond to a request for comment. Israel rarely acknowledges strikes carried out in Syria.
Israel has repeatedly struck Syrian and Iran-linked targets in Syria in the past few years and has vowed to push back against increasing Iranian influence in its neighboring country.
The news of the alleged near-miss came amid jitters just a month after a Ukrainian passenger plane crashed shortly after take-off from Tehran, killing all 176 people on board.
Iran said the plane was mistakenly shot down by its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard.
In a statement, Russian Ministry of Defense spokesperson Igor Konashenkov said that the strike was carried out at about 2am on Thursday.
Four Israeli F-16 jets hit the suburbs of Damascus with eight missiles without taking into account that a passenger plane with 172 civilians on board was preparing to land in the city’s airport around the same time, he said.
Konashenkov did not name the airline or flight number, saying only that it was an Airbus A320 en route from Tehran that “came near to entering the zone of a deadly anti-aircraft missile and artillery fire.”
The plane had to make an emergency landing at Hmeimeem Air Base, which is operated by the Russian military, about 300km north of Damascus, he said.
The Russian claims have not been independently verified.
FlightRadar24, a Web site that tracks air traffic, showed Syrian airline Cham Wings Flight 514 — an Airbus A320-211 — taking off from Najaf at 1:07am local time on Thursday morning. It could be seen approaching Damascus about an hour later before turning back and diverting its course to the north.
It appears to have landed in or near Hmeimeem half an hour later.
Flightradar24 listed the arrival time and destination as unknown.
The airline offered no immediate comment.
The US Department of the Treasury placed Cham Wings on its sanctions list in 2016 for allegedly transporting militants to Syria to fight on behalf of the Syrian government and for moving weapons and equipment to aid it in the nine-year conflict.
In the statement, the Russian military accused Israel of endangering the “lives of hundreds of innocent civilians.”
“Scheduled airline traffic in the Syrian air space, as well as everywhere in the world, takes place on well-known altitude flight levels and is clearly detected by Israel’s radar equipment,” Konashenkov said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS