Patriot Faults 'to Blame for Tornado Deaths'

Faults in a multibillion dollar US missile system may have been responsible for the shooting down of an RAF Tornado GR4, killing both crewmen, during the Iraq war, it was claimed yesterday.

Flight Lieutenant Kevin Main, pilot, and Flight Lieutenant David Williams, navigator, were killed when their bomber was destroyed by a Patriot missile battery near the Kuwaiti border on March 23.

After the attack sh the US military suggested the Tornado's "friend or foe" transponder may have been responsible.

But Robert Riggs, a US journalist with the Patriot unit which shot down the Tornado, told Radio 4's Today programme that US soldiers had told him that the missile system had identified the Tornado as an enemy missile and that such misidentifications were happening "dozens of times" a day.

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."

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said it would not comment on the claims as a board of inquiry was still investigating the incident.

But there is disquiet at the MoD and within the RAF at the time the inquiry has taken and the apparent reticence of the US army.

"We're talking about a multibillion dollar missile system here and that apparently can't differentiate between a missile and a Tornado coming in with full flaps and the landing gear down," said Andrew Brooks of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

"Either the software is rubbish or somebody had to override an awful lot of things because they were fixated that it was a missile. Either way it's very embarrassing, and when something is embarrassing for the US military they tend not to want to talk about it. They don't like to air their dirty laundry in public."