Ukrainian officials insist on Israeli pilot observed a meteor - not a missile explosion – in the country's stake
insisting it was not a missile.
An El Al pilot reported seeing a missile fired from the ground over central Ukraine during a Tel Aviv‑Moscow flight at night on July 4. Israeli officials said the missile exploded a few miles from the plane.
Pilots of two other planes flying over the Dnipropetrovsk region reported seeing a big blue fireball that resembled a missile explosion at the same time.
The incident was a sensitive issue in Ukraine because in October, an errant missile fired from a Ukrainian military base shot down a Russian Sibur Airlines plane, killing all 78 people on board, most of them immigrants to Israel.
The Defense Ministry issued a statement on July 6 saying that no missiles had been fired in the area that night and that the pilots may have witnessed a meteor entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
Officials from the National Space Agency also suggested a meteor could have been the culprit, as did Yaroslav Skalko, deputy chairman of the country’s civil aviation department.
“The airplane crews who saw on July 4 a flash over Ukrainian territory that resembled a missile explosion were observing phenomena of unidentified origin not related to the activities of the Ukrainian armed forces,” the Defense Ministry statement said.
The ministry said the stocks of missiles and other long‑range ammunition have been inspected and nothing is missing.
President Leonid Kuchma said July 5 that no missile‑firing exercises had been held in Ukraine since the October crash. Quoted by Interfax Ukraine July 5 in Copenhagen, where he was attending an EU meeting, Kuchma called the suggestion that the incident involved a Ukrainian missile “absurd.”
Kuchma and the Defense Ministry issued similarly strong denials last October when the Sibur Airlines plane went down, even though the Ministry had been holding test missile launches near the site of that crash around the time the plane went down.
Israeli officials were especially concerned about the most recent incident because it came the same day that an Egyptian immigrant shot and killed two people at the El Al’s ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport.
