AFP, LONDON: Experts were divided on Tuesday over how a British military transport plane crashed in Iraq over the weekend, with some arguing that a bomb was planted on board and others blaming a missile or a rocket.
On the ground, investigators continued to search for clues from the wreckage, while British Prime Minister Tony Blair refused to be drawn to conclusions.
“We will be able to give people more details of that in due course,” he told British television, referring to Sunday's crash that killed 10 military personnel northwest of Baghdad.
Chief of the Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup said it could take some time to discover the cause of Britain's biggest one-day loss of life in Iraq since it helped launch the invasion in March 2003.
Two militant Islamic groups have claimed, separately, that they brought the C-130 Hercules down, and the Arabic television network Al-Jazeera broadcast a video from one of them purporting to show the attack on the plane, followed by a fireball and debris.
Experts say that any number of factors could have resulted in the fatal crash, ranging from an attack to engine failure or pilot error. At the moment, all talk about the cause was mere speculation, they said.
Citing a senior Ministry of Defence source, the Sun tabloid newspaper swung in favour of the bomb theory.
“It is clear the C-130 exploded in mid-air and shattered into thousands of pieces,” the source was quoted as saying.
“A bomb could have been planted on the plane when it refuelled at Baghdad and stopped to collect passengers and cargo,” the same source said.
Another theory being aired is that an anti-tank missile devastated the aircraft, but Andrew Brookes, an expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, was not convinced.
That would be “next to impossible,” he told AFP.
“An anti-tank missile is designed to be fired against a lumbering tank, not against something (like a plane) that is doing six miles (10 kilometres) a minute,” he explained.
“The chances of using it for that purpose (hitting a plane) are next to nothing,” said Brookes, noting that in Iraq there were any number of surface-to-air missiles specifically designed to hit aircraft.
The problem was that the US-led military coalition in the country failed to put sufficient numbers of troops on the ground to guard vast munition stockpiles that belonged to toppled dictator Saddam Hussein, said the expert.
As a result, “there's been hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of small arms stolen… they're all over the place and of course they are available for the insurgents to use,” Brookes said.
Thomas Withington, an analyst at the Centre for Defence Studies at London's King's College, strongly doubted that a missile of any sort had destroyed the plane.
“I'm ruling out a missile at this stage because those RAF C-130s are fitted with a range of self-protection equipment,” he told AFP, referring to flares, radars and other warning devices.
A more convincing theory was that insurgents managed to hit the plane with a simple rocket, he said.
Transport aircraft are particularly vulnerable to such an attack at the moment they make their final approach to land due, to their size and relative lack of speed.
“I am wondering whether it might be a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) that was shot at the aircraft… If someone fires an RPG there is very little you can do because it is a dumb munition, you get no warning. The first thing you get to know about it is when it hits.”
