Terror of 290 People in Sky of Persian Gulf
On Black Sunday (July 3, 1988), the American warship, the USS Vincennes, deployed in the Persian Gulf, fired two missiles at an Iran Airbus passenger plane and martyred 290 innocent passengers on board and the U.S. President not only refrained from apologizing but also he awarded the commander of the warship with the Legion of Merit decoration.
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On that unforgettable night, Iran Air’s Airbus Flight 655 (IR655) was flying over the Strait of Hormuz from the port city of Bandar Abbas to Dubai which was hit by two standard missiles at an altitude of 12,000 feet over the Persian Gulf and it crashed and all 290 people on board, including 46 foreign passengers and 66 under-13 children, were killed.
The USS Vincennes on May 28, 1988, had sailed to the Persian Gulf from Naval Station San Diego. The U.S., in an obvious process, was doing its best in order not to let Iranians be the winners of the Iraq-Iran war and it used to help Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with militarily aids in any condition. Seemingly, the USS Vincennes was aimed at identifying any flying object either plane or missile, processing the intelligence, following targets simultaneously and controlling fires in favor of Iraq. The warship was also equipped with different kinds of surface to air missiles like radar and laser-controlled ones with the range of over 408 kilometers.
On the other side of this human crime was Captain Mohsen Rezaeian, the Iranian experienced pilot, who was in charge of flying Iran Air Airbus Flight 655 who had over 7,000 hours of sorties of flight in his record. The duration of the flight from Bandar Abbas International Airport to Dubai Airport had been estimated at 28 minutes at an altitude of 14,000 feet. The first minutes of the flight were as the schedule and the plane was reaching the 12,000-feet altitude and Captain Rezaeian was constantly in touch with the control towers of Bandar Abbas and Dubai airports. At the time of the incident, Brigadier General Shahram Rostami was deputy commander of Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force. According to martyr Rostami’s official remarks, the U.S. Army had conversation with Captain Rezaeian before firing the missile. The size of Airbus A300B2 is 53m X 5m excluding 45m of the wing, and the size of F-14 Fighter-Jet is 20 X 3.5m excluding 20m of wing. So distinguishing an Airbus passenger plane with a fighter-jet was not difficult although objects on the radar is not seen based on their true sizes, this type of Airbus due to its lower velocity comparing to F-14 Fighter-Jet and its length was distinguishable by the operator of the radar system and even the radar system.
Former Commander of USS Sides warship David Carlson in an interview with Newsweek weekly talked about the incident and said, “Iranian Airbus was sending signals that it was a commercial plane and at the same time it was rising high with the lower speed comparing to F-14 Fighter-Jet plane. Even in such a circumstance, if they had been identified the plane as a fighter-jet, I doubt a fighter-jet like F-14 could be considered a serious threat for the USS Vincennes, or the USS Sides or any other vessel (because Iranian F-14s were not equipped with air to surface weapons and the existing F-14s at sixth and ninth air bases of Bushehr and Bandar Abbas only were being used to fly to protect Iranian oil tankers against the air strikes and they were in charge of protecting the Navy and marine forces). Even operators in charge of radar system of the USS Forrestal aircraft carrier identified the plane as a commercial one. Deployed F-14 Fighter-Jets on the USS Forrestal could have distinguished the identity of the approaching plane to become sure of its being civilian if the USS Vincennes Captain William Rodgers had asked them, but due to some reasons he refrained.”
Pro-West media from BBC to other major media outlets tried to justify this horrible crime as the error of Captain Rodgers, the commander of the USS Vincennes, but according to later remarks and interviews, Captain Rodgers has confessed that he did it to scare Iran and he has committed this crime intentionally. Americans have become falsely and hypocritically famous for opposing terrorism. Their explicit support of terrorist Iranian grouplet Mujahideen Khalq Organization (known as Monafeqeen Khalq) with a bloody record of 17,000 terrors in Iran and President Donald Trump’s official announcement of assassinating Martyr Qasem Soleimani and his Iranian and Iraqi comrades are just two out of thousands of leaves of the U.S. official terrorism record. This terror of 290 innocent people in the sky of the Persian Gulf has been one of these kinds of the U.S. methods for safeguarding the hellish power of the White House.
By: Hamid Reza Naghashian
