Iran warns about captive pilots’ health condition in Qatar, demands their release
International Desk
The head of the Missing-in-Action Search Committee of Iran’s Armed Forces General Staff warned about the poor physical condition of Iranian pilots held in Qatar, urging the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to send an air ambulance to transfer them to Iran.
“The place where the captive pilots are being held on the water does not provide suitable conditions for maintaining their health,” Brigadier General Mohammad Bagherzadeh warned on Saturday.
Qatar must move the Iranian captives to land and transfer them to a fully equipped hospital as soon as possible, he said.
Bagherzadeh welcomed Qatar’s decision to receive a team of Iranian experts and urged Doha to cooperate in speeding up efforts to address the captives’ condition.
In a letter to ICRC President Mirjana Spoljaric on March 16, Bagherzadeh had already urged the organization to investigate the pilots’ fate and establish direct contact with them.
He identified the three pilots as Javad Salehi, Abdolmajid Dashtian and Emran Behrouzian, while confirming that Majid Kazemi, one of the four pilots involved, had been martyred and his remains returned to Iran.
According to Bagherzadeh, the three pilots were captured in Qatar during an air strike on an American base in the tiny Persian Gulf country days after the US and Israel launched a war of aggression against Iran in February.