09 December 2005
Vital intelligence which may have saved an RAF Hercules aircraft from being shot down in Iraq was not passed on to the flight, an official report into the crash revealed yesterday.
The crew were not told that they were flying into an area where two American Black Hawk helicopters had come under fire on the same day.
At the same time, intelligence staff on the ground did not even know the flightpath being taken by the transport plane.
These failures of intelligence led to Flight XV179, en route to an airbase at Balad from Baghdad, being brought down by insurgents with 10 servicemen killed, the largest single loss of British lives in the conflict.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article331960.ece
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