SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq, 12 August 2007 — Aviation officials from Iraq’s Kurdish region yesterday dismissed reports that a Swedish airliner had been targeted by a missile as it took off with 130 passengers on board. According to the Swedish TT news agency, the pilots of a Nordic Airways MD-83 jet saw flashes in the sky on Thursday as they took off from Sulaimaniyah in northern Iraq and feared they may be under attack.
But the chairman of the Sulaimaniyah Airport Authority, Kamaran Ahmed, said a local investigation found no evidence that a missile was fired and blamed the scare on bright lights being used on the ground.
“We think that the object that had been noticed by the pilot ‘suspiciously’ was a special type of ‘high intensity lighting projector’ mounted on vehicles usually used by hunters in the area,” he said, in a statement in English. The beam could also have been from a light used by farmers during a rush to harvest in the region, the statement added, while insisting that security forces had searched a 30-kilometer (18-mile) diameter area around the airport.
