The Iranian confession that their military shot down the Ukraine International Airlines plane near Tehran is the end of the matter as far as international diplomacy and the media is concerned. The official story then about what happened is this: It's 2am on January 8th 2020 and our guy is sitting in a Tor-M1 air-defense missile system about 10kms north-west of Imam Khomeini international airport, west of Tehran.
General Soleimani had been buried the day before, and in the last half-hour or so a couple dozen Iranian ballistic missiles had been fired from western Iran at two US bases in Iraq.
The entire Iranian military is on alert and stress levels are particularly high. There's been a lot of chatter about a likely US response to the Iranian missiles and our guy is one of several teams positioned around Tehran tasked with shooting down anything on his radar screen that fits the profile. But as the hours pass without incident, he starts to doubt he'll see any action - at least, not tonight.
By 6am the only thing he can report having seen on his radar screen are each of the 9 scheduled flights that departed the nearby airport that night. He watched them take normal flight paths off the northwest runway, climb into the clear night sky and then veer north or northeast. Since the Tor-M1 system he is operating is fitted with IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) functionality, he could even see their call signs. The second-to-last one was Qatar Airways Flight QR8408 heading for Hong Kong.
Click for Full Text!