The U.

S intelligence community now has confirmation, according to the reports, which this program has not been able to verify.

The aircraft is believed to have been struck by a surface to air Russian village missile system.

The reporting sights.

Three are named American officials.

Their assessment.

The plane was hit by mistake by Iran.

176 passengers lost their lives when the jet came down, and it happened just a few hours after the Iranian missile attack on bases in Iraq housing U.

S forces.

The reporting says that U.

S intelligence picked up signals of radar systems being turned on on the ground.

On that satellite detected infrared blips of two missile launches and a subsequent explosion in the last couple of hours.

President Trump was asked about what he thought had brought the plane down.

I have my suspicions.

It was very I don't want to say that because other people have those suspicions.

Also, uh, it's a tragic thing when I see that it's a tragic thing.

Uh, but somebody could have made a mistake on the other side.

Could have.

Could have made a mistake.

It was flying.

It was it was flying in.

Not our system.

Now has nothing do with us?

It was flying in a pretty rough neighborhood and somebody could have made a mistake.

Some people say it was mechanical.

I personally don't think that's, uh, even a question personally.

On this evening, Downing Street said that it was looking into quote very concerning reports about the Tehran airliner crash following speculation in the media that the jet was shot down.

For its part, the Iranian Civil Aviation Authority released its preliminary report today and said that the plane was returning to the airport following quote a technical problem, the parents of one of the crew members lost holding onto each other at the memorial in Kiev International Airport.

One line in a chorus of morning around the world, but particularly in Iran itself.

Among the 176 who died.

Ah, large number of Iranian students returning after the holidays to their studies at Canadian universities.

If it turns out that the plane was shot down by mistake.

By Iran itself, it will have serious questions to answer, particularly from its own citizens.

Arash Pores are a B and Puma Gordy, where passengers on board the plane doing a masters in computer science at the University of Alberta.

They got married a week ago in Iran.

A friend and fellow student spoke of conversations they'd all had together about the future.

Me and arrest was in this same research program.

Used to go to research meetings to get her all the time and talking about research, talking about their plans, things that we wanted to do.

Other Iranian students today I couldn't even begin to articulate their loss.

So if Iranian forces brought down that passenger plane, what will that mean for tensions between the U.

S.

And Iran?

Are Washington correspondent Shiv on Kennedy joins us now, Shawn.

Well, Christian, we're getting no more answers out of the White House or the Pentagon beyond what we're seeing on those reports, U.

S.

Intelligence sources.

They're confirming that they do have evidence that it was an Iranian missile that hit that plane and knocked it out of the sky.

You heard the president there in Parks report, dismissing the notion that this was somehow mechanical failure.

It was a mistake, he pointed to on the other side.

The president also mentioned, in his words, their black boxes.

Now Iran is so far said it will not hand over the black box is that it has recovered from the crash site.

We know that one of those boxes is damaged, which means it may have to pass them over to Canadian and French, specializes people that specializes in this type of accident.

President Trump has said ideally, though, that they would end up in the hands of Boeing, which manufactured the plane, and this may have gone unnoticed in the chaos of the past week.

But four days ago, President Rouhani off Iran reminded the world in a tweet.

The United States itself once accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger jet in July 1988 that was flying from Iran to Dubai and killed all 290 people onboard.

So mistakes like this can happen even with the most sophisticated off systems.

Of course, if it does turn out to have been a mistake on Iran's part, there will be those who point to America's role in all of this.

That it alongside Iran was part of a terrible chain of events that have ended up in the downing off this year.

Ukrainian plane on the death of 176 people.

Sean.

Thank you.

While the U.

S.

President speculation on what brought the plane down on the only comments that have been causing a stir, our international editor, Lindsey Hilsum, is in Baghdad.

How is this going down in the region?

World Christian In this part of the world, events on mistakes and accidents change history and often in a deadly way of Sherborne, who has just pointed out.

As yet.

There's been no reaction from here in Baghdad, but obviously the Ukrainians it was their plane are extremely worried.

A team has been sent to Iran to try and get to the bottom of this.

President Zelinsky has said that he's going to be calling President Rouhani in Iran and, of course, the poor Ukrainians.

They were the ones who had their own their plane, MH 17 brought down by a Russian missile over Donetsk several years ago.

But President Trump has been talking about other things as well.

He said that there are now going to be increased sanctions on Iran, that they have already been implemented.

But he didn't detail exactly what they were here in Baghdad.

That is viewed with great concern because this economy is very dependent on the Iranian economy.

The other thing, he said, was he talked about the attacks last week on the American Embassy here in the Green Zone in Baghdad.

He said that they were trying to blow up the embassy.

They being Iranian backed militia.

Well, maybe they were, or maybe they weren't.

But last night there were two very loud bangs.

I could hear them here in my hotel.

Those were two, possibly three ca Tuchel rockets that were fired at the American Embassy.

They fell short.

They didn't hurt anybody, but they were assigned that the Iranian backed militia here may not be standing down as we had thought last night.

They may be standing up and they may be trying to doom or against the Americans here, The French, the Germans, the British, they're very worried.

They're worried that U.

S forces here in the coalition fighting Islamic state on training the Iraqi troops.

They may not be able to stay here very much longer, and it will be up to NATO and the Europeans to back up the Iraqis in their fight against Islamic state.

The American presence in this region is in great danger.

Tonight.

Lindsey Wilson in Baghdad.

Joining me now by Sky from Canada is Giancarlo Fiorella from the investigative website Belling Cat, which specializes in fact checking and open source intelligence.

Thanks for coming on the program.

Tell me from what you've seen so far from the evidence that you've seen so far, where does this point?

I would say that it's still relatively early hell, what a pair of another.

We have been working over the last 36 hours or so on verifying a couple of images that would indicate ah, the involvement of a missile in this event, there are in particular to images that show what looks like a missile pregnant.

We've been working Thio determining authenticity for the last over the last couple hours.

Okay, so just looking at these images now, I mean that one.

The thing we can see now looks to some people like a war, but actually having looked at the kind of imaging of that tour missile.

It's the front of the missile, isn't it?

What does that tell you?

No.

Well, again, we We haven't yet verified the authenticity of these pictures.

So I do wanna warn that this is precisely the kind of environment where people have a tendency to jump to conclusions, too, to read into evidence that doesn't actually exist.

And so this is precisely the moment when we have to be very careful.

We don't know that these images are from that location on that event.

Yes, I was gonna ask you that.

How credible do you think these images actually are?

They could be related to this event, but they could also be from anywhere else in the world.

That could be from another place in Iran.

Maybe they're from that area, but they're not related to the event.

And so that's what the verification on the establishment of the authenticity of the images comes in.

It's a very thorough, uh, time consuming process.

And that's what we've been dedicating most of our attention to sense since these images surfaced online.

So are you saying that so far you as far as you're concerned, you're not yet prepared to basically say that the Iranian version of events, which is that was engine failure and the plane had to return to Tehran airport is wrong.

That's a possibility as well.

With the data that we have at the moment, Belling Cat works with open source information and we have lots of pictures and videos from the crash site.

That's show, uh, all kinds of damage to the remains of the aircraft, in particular the engines.

Those are gonna be really importantly forward with an investigation into this event.

But again, it's I think it's still too early to say either way.

What what it is that happened here.

And we have to verify all of this information that's come in.

Okay, Now, your websites also been treating at this picture of a boulders, apparently at the crash site.

What does that tell you?

And again, what's the veracity of that image?

So those images we were able Thio, do you locate to the crash lane?

Um, I found them to be really distressing because this is potentially ah, the scene of a crime.

This wasa shoot down.

If this wasa shoot don't event.

Um, you don't want to disturb the crash site before a thorough investigation could be conducted.

And I'm not sure that one has conducted.

And so the the presence of heavy machine beside the bulldozing of direct very distressing.

OK, Jon.

Karl, if your brother thank you very much need for joining us.