Tehran, Aug 2026: Iran has urged Qatar to allow an Iranian military fact-finding team to enter the country to investigate claims that three Iranian pilots were captured after their fighter jets were shot down in March.
Mohammad Bagherzadeh, Commander of the Missing Persons Search Committee of Iran’s Armed Forces General Staff, made the appeal after Qatar rejected his earlier allegation that its forces had detained the pilots.
Qatar’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Majed Al Ansari denied the claim on Saturday in a social media post, prompting a fresh response from Bagherzadeh.
The Iranian commander said a team of experts from the Iranian Air Force had been waiting for several months for permission to enter Qatar and conduct an investigation into the reported incident.
Bagherzadeh alleged that repeated delays and what he described as “continuous obstructionism” by Qatari authorities had prevented efforts to establish the whereabouts of the missing pilots and facilitate their return to Iran.
He called on Doha to permit the Iranian team to conduct field investigations rather than rejecting the allegations without allowing an independent inquiry.
“Instead of denying the issue and placing restrictions on the fact-finding path,” Bagherzadeh urged Qatar to allow the Iranian experts to enter the country and investigate the circumstances surrounding the incident.
In a letter released on Saturday, the Iranian commander had claimed that Qatari forces captured three Iranian pilots after their fighter aircraft were shot down while returning from a military mission targeting a US base in Qatar in March.
According to the Iranian account, a fourth pilot was killed in the incident.
The body of the deceased pilot, identified as Majid Kazemi, was reportedly repatriated to Iran and buried in the southern city of Shiraz in late July.
Qatar’s denial has added a new dimension to the dispute, with Tehran now pressing for an investigation to establish what happened to the pilots allegedly missing since the March incident.
The conflicting claims come amid heightened regional tensions and growing military concerns involving Iran, the United States and Gulf countries. Any agreement allowing Iranian investigators to enter Qatar could provide an opportunity to clarify the circumstances surrounding the alleged shootdown and the fate of the missing personnel.
(The content of this article is sourced from a news agency and has not been edited by the Mavericknews30 team.)
