Qatar has denied Iranian claims that it is holding Iranian military pilots, saying the aircraft involved had violated Qatari airspace in March and that the pilots failed to respond to repeated attempts to establish contact.
A spokesperson for Qatar’s Foreign Ministry said on Saturday that search-and-rescue teams later recovered the remains of one of the pilots. Doha also contacted Iranian authorities to coordinate the handover of the remains, the spokesperson said.
Qatar added that Tehran had not yet responded to an invitation to examine details surrounding the incident and the operations in question.
Iran Demands Access to Investigate Pilots’ Fate
Iranian military officials renewed their calls on Sunday for Qatar to allow an Iranian investigation team to enter the country and determine what happened to the pilots Tehran says were captured.
Mohammad Baqerzadeh, commander of the Committee for the Search for Missing Persons of Iran’s Armed Forces General Staff, said the Iranian Air Force and a fact-finding team had been waiting for months to gain access to Qatar, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency.
Baqerzadeh accused Qatari authorities of repeatedly delaying the investigation and preventing the pilots from returning to Iran. He also urged the International Committee of the Red Cross to intervene urgently and follow up on the case.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) separately accused Qatar of refusing to allow an Iranian expert team and fact-finding committee to investigate the pilots’ fate.
The IRGC called on Doha to permit Iranian specialists to participate in the investigation rather than dismissing Tehran’s claims regarding the alleged detention of the pilots.
Conflicting Accounts Over Three Iranian Pilots
The dispute followed a report by Iran’s state news agency IRNA, which quoted a senior military official as saying that three Iranian pilots had been captured alive by Qatari forces after ejecting from their fighter jets during a combat mission targeting a military facility in Qatar.
The Iranian official called on the International Committee of the Red Cross to investigate the pilots’ fate.
Qatar, however, rejected the claim that it was detaining the pilots, maintaining that the aircraft had entered Qatari airspace and that the pilots had failed to respond to attempts to contact them.
According to IRNA, the mission took place as part of Iran’s response to US and Israeli attacks that began on February 28.
Qatar said it took defensive measures after the Iranian aircraft violated its airspace and the pilots failed to respond to communications.
Regional Conflict Intensifies
The dispute comes against the backdrop of a broader regional conflict that erupted following the US-Israeli attacks on Iran in February.
Tehran subsequently launched attacks against targets in Israel as well as US military facilities in the Gulf, significantly escalating tensions across the region.
The conflicting accounts from Qatar and Iran over the fate of the pilots have added another point of tension between the two countries, with Tehran demanding access for an investigation while Doha maintains that its account of the incident differs fundamentally from the Iranian version.
