Faults in a hi-tech US missile system may have been responsible for the shooting down of an RAF Tornado aircraft with the loss of two crewmen during the Iraq war, it was claimed today.
Following the March 23rd, 2003 "friendly fire" incident the American military suggested that a problem with the Tornado GR4's own "friend or foe" identification transponder may have been to blame.
But the BBC said it had uncovered evidence indicating that a Patriot missile system wrongly identified the aircraft as an enemy rocket.
The attack, near the Iraq-Kuwait border, killed the Tornado pilot Flight Lieutenant Kevin Main and its navigator Flight Lieutenant Dave Williams.
Mr Robert Riggs, a US journalist embedded with the Patriot unit which shot down the Tornado, told Radio 4's Todayprogramme that US soldiers had told him that the Patriot system identified the Tornado as an enemy missile.
Such misidentifications were happening "dozens of times" a day, he told the programme.
Mr Philip Coyle, a US assistant secretary of defence for testing and evaluation between 1994 and 2001, told the programme: "The Patriot system is designed to be pretty much automatic.
These accidents have shown that this is a problem with the Patriot system, not with pilot error, not with identification systems."
The programme said that it had discovered that a "lessons learned" report put together by the US Army after the war confirmed that non-existent missiles were identified by Patriot.