On the morning of 3rd of July 1988, an Iran Air airbus passenger plane, flight number 655, took off from the port city of Bandar Abbas for a routine thrice a week flight to Dubai across the Persian Gulf with 290 passengers on board including 160 men, 73 women and 57 children.
It was cruising unsuspecting of the dangers that lurked below. While it was still in Iranian airspace, unknown to it, an American warship had stealthily entered Iranian coastal waters.
At 10.22 AM, exactly five minutes after flight’s departure from Bandar Abbas, the Commander of USS Vincennes, Captain Will Rogers ordered the firing of two missiles at the Iranian passenger.
The plane immediately exploded in mid air, splintered and crashed into the waters of the Persian Gulf. There were no survivors. All 290 passengers went to a watery grave.
Among the victims of the American crime against humanity, 37 passengers were non-Iranians and were nationals of Italy, Yugoslavia, Pakistan, India and some Persian Gulf Arab states.
This sorrowful incident shocked millions of freeborn people all over the world and plunged the Islamic Iran into mourning. It was a grave tragedy.
The US navy’s measure was a blatant crime, more so, since Washington had directly entered the imposed war against the Islamic Republic on behalf of its surrogate, Saddam Hussein of the Ba’th minority regime of Iraq in order to try to save him from impending defeat.
The US downing of the Iranian Airbus is considered a crime by any law and criteria and its perpetrators should be tried and punished. But the then US officials led by President Ronald Reagan not only failed to punish the perpetrators of this heinous crime but also awarded the commander of the US warship, Will Rogers, with a medal of honour for his dastardly deed.
It was proof that the whole administration in the White House was nothing more than a bunch of criminals.
During wars, many civilians die and many passenger planes have been attacked, but the aircraft that were attacked had either deviated from their course or violated enemy airspace. However, the Iranian passenger had done neither of this and was targeted deliberately by the USS Vincennes with missiles while in Iranian airspace and still in ascending towards its commercial air corridor
In its first reaction towards the crime committed by its warship, the US claimed that it targeted an F-14 plane. But when it was confirmed that the plane downed was a passenger aircraft as clarified by TVs all over the world with shocking photos of the bodies of women, men and children torn apart and floating on the Persian Gulf waters, the lies of the US officials began to be revealed to a shocked world.
But instead of admitting their crime, the US officials continued to tell more lies to cover up their crime. The Americans next claimed that the Iranian passenger plane had deviated from its air corridor and had ignored warnings by the USS Vincennes. This was a pack of lies.
The wreckage of the aircraft and mangled bodies scattered in Iran’s coastal waters, belied Washington’s story and confirmed beyond a doubt that it was shot in Iranian waters.
The documents and evidence which were released by Iran as well as independent and impartial sources proved that the Vincennes commander knew that he was firing at a passenger plan in the act of climbing in the air.
He did not give any warning as he claimed and on the contrary Will Rogers entered Iranian waters, on orders from the Pentagon, to target the Iranian aircraft.
Captain David Carlson who was also an officer on the Vincennes, sometime after the incident divulged the truth and admitted that Captain Rogers had received from Pentagon the order to attack the Iranian passenger plane and for this criminal act the Vincennes had entered Iranian territorial waters in order to be positioned right under the regular three times a week scheduled flight.
The downing of the Iranian passenger plane and the killing of its 290 passengers on board earned Will Rogers and his crew a medal of bravery from President Ronald Reagan, a leader with the image of a lame duck, who was called “imbecile” by Imam Khomeini and who died recently after having lost whatever mind and memory he had.
The crime will forever remain a blot on Reagan, the US officials and their military.
After the probe committee of the US House of Representatives revealed part of the facts related to the intentional attack on the Iranian Airbus, the US government in order to prevent the disclosure of all facts, handed the case over to the CIA, which termed the probe confidential and practically put it in a classified file.
But world opinion and world people could never forget the cowardly US crime, although at government level, especially in European countries there was no reaction other than empty words of regret and sympathy, and that too belatedly, because almost all these countries wanted their blue-eyed boy, Saddam to be saved from defeat in the Imposed War.
Without the least doubt the downing of the Iranian passenger was and will remain a firm proof of US state terrorism. If only, a decisive reaction had been shown at the international level, the US would have thought twice before repeating its crimes and terrorist acts in the next 16 years, and the world would have been spared of the slaughters in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the horrible Abu Ghuraib and Guantanamo scandals.
http://english.iribnews.ir/IranVision_body.aspx?ID=346
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