Iranian state TV cited a report by the Associated Press (AP) claiming that 100 bodies were found at the site of a US military plane crash in Afghanistan, but the news agency says this report doesn’t exist.
The Islamic Republic of Iran News Network (IRINN), which is part of the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, reported Tuesday, according to BBC Monitoring: “US authorities have not yet released official casualty figures but the Associated Press, quoting local officials in Ghazni Province in Afghanistan, has announced that nearly 100 corpses have been found at the crash site.”
The AP has published reports on the disaster, but none of them have contained the 100-bodies figure. The news agency also told BBC Monitoring that it did not report this, the monitoring site tweeted Tuesday.
The AP has not yet responded to Business Insider’s request for comment.
Iran’s rolling news channel said: "US authorities have not yet released official casualty figures but the Associated Press, quoting local officials in Ghazni Province in Afghanistan, has announced that nearly 100 corpses have been found at the crash site." pic.twitter.com/WRwq3i2j1w
— BBC Monitoring (@BBCMonitoring) January 28, 2020
Neither officials in the US nor in Ghazni, the Taliban-held province where the crash took place, have given a death toll so far.
The Taliban claimed it shot down the plane, and said it contained high-ranking CIA officers. The US has disputed this claim, with defense officials warning on Monday that the “first report’s always wrong.”
US officials on Tuesday recovered the remains and are confirming the identities of people involved in the crash, Reuters reported. The officials did not give a number.
The plane, a US Air Force Bombardier E-11A, is widely believed to have been carrying no more than six people at the time of the crash. New York Times correspondent Mujib Mashal said on Tuesday that the most widely-cited figure is two.
Ghazni provincial police chief Khalid Wardak told Reuters on Tuesday “there are four bodies and two onboard were alive and they are missing,” but said Taliban fighters repelled Afghanistan’s attempt to access the crash site.
Iran’s state-run Channel One network also peddled a theory that a senior CIA official named Michael D’Andrea had been on the plane.
In reports broadcast by the channel, a photo of actor Fredric Lehne — who played a character inspired by D’Andrea in the 2012 movie “Zero Dark Thirty” — was shown instead of D’Andrea himself.
Channel One also claimed that D’Andrea — who leads the CIA’s activities on Iran — played a key role in the US assassination of Iranian military general Qassem Soleimani, according to BBC Monitoring.
It’s not clear if this is true, and the CIA declined to comment when contacted by Business Insider.
Source » businessinsider