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Middle East crisis live: Trump uses expletive-ridden social media post to threaten Iran’s infrastructure

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) denounced Trump for “mocking Islam” and invoking Allah in his Truth Social post threatening Iran. CAIR released the following statement on Sunday: “President Trump’s deranged mocking of Islam and his threats to attack civilian infrastructure in Iran are reckless, dangerous, and indicative of a mindset that shows indifference to human life and contempt for religious beliefs. “These statements are not made in a vacuum. They follow a long pattern of anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies that have dehumanized Muslims at home and abroad. The casual use of ‘Praise be to Allah’ in the context of violent threats reflects a disturbing willingness to weaponize religious language while simultaneously denigrating Islam and its followers. “Congress must not remain on vacation while the President openly promises to commit war crimes that could trigger even more regional and global conflict. Lawmakers have a duty to reconvene and to reassert their authority over matters of war and peace, and to ensure that no president can unilaterally drag our nation into war.”

A timeline of the two US military jets shot down by Iran forces

In a significant escalation of the US-Israel war in Iran, Iranian forces shot down two US military jets in recent days. Three pilots involved in the loss of an F-15 Strike Eagle and an A-10 Warthog ground attack plane have been rescued, but the incidents put the US on notice that Iranian air defenses may not be as degraded as the Trump administration has broadly claimed. Here’s a timeline of what we know so far. 4/3/2026 Reports of US planes struck down Overnight on Friday, an F-15E Strike Eagle with two crew members and belonging to the 48th Fighter Wing of the US air force in Europe was shot down by Iranian forces, with photos showing the photos of the wreckage circulating on social media. It is believed to be the first US plane brought down by enemy fire during the conflict. A second plane, an A-10 Warthog, was struck by Iranian fire. Before ejecting, the pilot was able to get the aircraft to Kuwaiti airspace and was also rescued, according to the Washington Post. 4/4/2026 A search and rescue mission unfolds One pilot on the F-15E Strike Eagle was rescued seven hours later with help from two US military helicopters, according to reports. The helicopter that rescued the pilot was reportedly hit by small arms fire, some wounding crew members on board. The helicopter landed safely and injured rescuers were reported to be receiving medical treatment. US officials then went quiet, offering no indication if the second airman had ejected safely and was in hiding, had been killed in the crash, or captured by Iranian forces. But US aircraft and helicopters were seen in the area where the fighter jet went down. 4/4/2026 Search for the second airman US and Iranian forces race to find the “seriously injured” second airman, the F-15’s weapons officer, outside Isfahan. The unnamed officer, armed only with a pistol, is later reported to have hidden out on a 7,000-ft ridge while US MQ-9 Reaper drones hit nearby Iranian forces if they came close to his position. Iranian forces got within 3km (1.8 miles) of the downed airman, a colonel, according Air & Space Forces Magazine. “This brave Warrior was behind enemy lines in the treacherous mountains of Iran, being hunted down by our enemies, who were getting closer and closer by the hour,” Trump said on Sunday. According to reports, the downed pilot made contact with US forces using an encrypted radio, while continuing to evade the pursuing Iranian forces. 4/4/2026 The CIA reportedly deploys a ruse The CIA pulled off a diversion, according to Axios, reportedly by planting fake information that the second airman had already been rescued and was being driven out of Iran. The agency used “unique capabilities” to search and locate them. “This was the ultimate needle in a haystack but in this case it was a brave American soul inside a mountain crevice, invisible but for CIA’s capabilities,” an official told the outlet. The Pentagon and White House then ordered an immediate rescue mission. Two MC-130J Air Force special operations transport planes landed at an landing airport near the downed airman. A regional intelligence official briefed on the mission told the Associated Press that the US military blew up two transport planes due to a technical malfunction. Reports suggest they make have got stuck in mud and were blown up on the ground by US forces to prevent them falling into Iranian hands. US forces then used three other transport planes to carry the airman and his rescuers out of Iran, according to the New York Times. 4/5/2026 Trump announces rescue “WE GOT HIM! My fellow Americans, over the past several hours, the United States Military pulled off one of the most daring Search and Rescue Operations in U.S. History, for one of our incredible Crew Member Officers, who also happens to be a highly respected Colonel, and who I am thrilled to let you know is now SAFE and SOUND!” Trump said. He later posted: “The Iranian Military was looking hard, in big numbers, and getting close. He is a highly respected Colonel. This type of raid is seldom attempted because of the danger to “man and equipment.” It just doesn’t happen!” Trump says the rescue of the missing F-15 weapons systems officer by US special operation forces was “an Easter miracle” in a text to NBC News on Sunday. “The enemy was large and violent. The rescuers were brilliant, strong, decisive, and as cool as anyone can be. The Iranians thought they had him, but it wasn’t even close,” he said, according to NBC. Trump said that after the fighter jet’s pilot was rescued on Friday, the US “couldn’t talk about” that mission “in that it would have highlighted that there was a second”. 4/5/206 Iran acknowledges a “so-called US military rescue operation” Iran’s military said on Sunday the US operation to rescue the airman had used an abandoned airport in Isfahan province. Ebrahim Zolfaghari, spokesman for the Iranian military’s central command, said: “The so-called US military rescue operation, planned as a deception and escape mission at an abandoned airport in southern Isfahan under the pretext of recovering the pilot of a downed aircraft, was completely foiled.” Zolfaghari also said two US “C-130 military transport planes and two Black Hawk helicopters were destroyed”.

Hungarian PM faces ‘false flag’ claims after Serbia says explosives found near pipeline

Serbia has said it found “explosives of devastating power” near a pipeline that carries Russian natural gas to Hungary and beyond, sparking claims by Hungary’s leading opposition candidate of a possible “false flag” operation aimed at influencing the country’s elections. On Sunday, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said he had been informed by Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, of the discovery near an extension of the TurkStream pipeline, which transports Russian gas through the Balkans to central and eastern Europe. “An investigation is under way,” Orbán said on social media, adding that he had convened an emergency meeting of the country’s defence council. The incident comes one week before Hungarians are due to cast their votes in a pivotal parliamentary election, in which Orbán’s 16-year hold on power is facing an unprecedented challenge from Péter Magyar, a former top member of the ruling Fidesz party. The election has pitted two versions of Hungary’s future against each other, as Orbán and Fidesz seek to convince voters that the war in Ukraine poses a deep threat to the country and that Orbán is best placed to handle this risk, while Magyar and his Tisza party urge voters to focus on economic stagnation, fraying social services and corruption. Vučić said on Sunday that the Serbian army and police had found two backpacks containing “two large packages of explosives with detonators” in the northern Serbian municipality of Kanjiža, “a few hundred metres from the gas pipeline”. He said he had informed Orbán of the initial results of the investigation into what he described as a “threat to the critical gas infrastructure”. The explosives could have “endangered many lives” and caused significant damage to the pipeline, Vučić added. He did not detail the origins of the explosives, saying instead that there were “certain traces” he could not disclose. “Our intelligence services did a good job,” he said. The incident, coming as Orbán trails in the polls, prompted political scrutiny across Hungary. On Sunday, Magyar said on social media that he and the Tisza party had been warned by multiple sources that something might happen in Serbia around Easter, “possibly involving a gas pipeline”, and allegedly carried out with Serbian and Russian assistance. “And now it has,” he said. He called on Orbán’s government to stop spreading panic and causing disruption. “Hungarians have every reason to fear that the outgoing prime minister, following the advice of Russian agents, is attempting to instil fear in his own people through false-flag operations,” he said. “I also want to make it clear that he will not be able to prevent next Sunday’s election.” The scepticism was echoed by Mujtaba Rahman, the managing director for Europe at Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. “Looks like a seemingly convenient threat of terrorist action,” he said on social media. “Designed to whip up further fear of military action against Hungary, for which Ukraine will no doubt be blamed.” The campaign heated up in February after Orbán claimed, without providing evidence, that Ukraine was plotting to disrupt Hungary’s energy system and said he had dispatched troops to safeguard the country’s energy infrastructure. Orbán has also repeatedly accused Ukraine of intentionally delaying repairs to the Soviet-era Druzhba pipeline, which brings Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia via Ukraine, and blocked EU approval of a €90bn loan to Ukraine over the feud. Rahman said Brussels and EU capitals “have been expecting a false-flag operation by Orbán – citing a national security risk – as grounds to postpone next Sunday’s elections that he looks set to lose. Could this be it?” On Sunday, Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, singled out Ukraine but stopped short of blaming them outright for the latest incident. “In the past few days and weeks, the Ukrainians organised an oil blockade against us, and then tried to put us under a total energy blockade … And now we have today’s incident,” he said in a post on Facebook. Orbán, posting on social media after the defence council meeting, said that what was so far known of the incident pointed to a prepared “act of sabotage”. While he did not directly blame Ukraine for the incident, he said: “Ukraine has been for years trying to cut off Europe from Russian energy.” Ukraine’s foreign ministry said on Sunday that it rejected any attempt to link Kyiv to the incident. “Ukraine has nothing to do with this,” it said on social media, adding that it had most probably been “a Russian false-flag operation as part of Moscow’s heavy interference in Hungarian elections”. Ákos Hadházy, a Hungarian independent MP and longtime critic of Orbán, cast doubt on the news from Serbia. “This is completely transparent and pathetic,” he wrote on social media. “But let’s not forget that propaganda still works,” he added. “Nor should we forget that next week, quite brutal things could come from the struggling regime.” Szabolcs Panyi, one of the country’s most prominent investigative journalists, also urged people to treat Sunday’s revelations with caution. Weeks earlier, he and other journalists had been told by sources in Hungarian government circles of a “Russia-backed false flag attack in Serbia targeting the gas pipeline to Hungary”, Panyi said on social media. The Serbian claims could rock the final days of the campaign, just as the White House gears up to have JD and Usha Vance visit the country in an apparent effort by the US vice-president to bolster Orbán in the polls. The US administration has long rallied behind Orbán, with Donald Trump repeatedly endorsing him and describing him as a “fantastic guy” and a “strong, powerful leader.” In recent weeks, questions have swirled about the US effort to keep Orbán in power, particularly as Russia appears to also be working to sway the election in Orbán’s favour. The Washington Post reported recently that Russian intelligence operatives had proposed staging an assassination attempt on Orbán to boost his chances of winning, while the Guardian found that disinformation networks with links to Russia were publishing content aimed at undermining Orbán’s main opponent.

There is no revival of Christianity in Britain | Letter

The retraction of the Bible Society’s report on Gen Z church attendance (YouGov withdraws survey said to show rising church attendance in England and Wales, 26 March) is a welcome moment of clarity, but the “fraudulent” data identified by YouGov only tells half the story. The report’s central premise, that young people are flocking back to the pews, was always an outlier when measured against the gold-standard British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey. Our new analysis of the BSA data shows that six in 10 people aged 16 to 34 identify with no religion. Furthermore, this is not a “phase” of youthful rebellion; 94% of those raised without religion remain non-religious as adults. For this generation, the search for meaning is not found in dogma, but in the humanist values of reason, kindness and personal responsibility. As the Church of England’s identity falls to just one in 10 of the general population, the disconnect between our national institutions and the British public has never been wider. We must stop treating the non-religious as a demographic absence and recognise them as a community with a positive, ethical worldview that deserves equal standing in the public square. Andrew Copson Chief executive, Humanists UK • Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.

How Paris swapped cars for bikes – and transformed its streets

When Corentin Roudaut moved to Paris 10 years ago, he was too scared to cycle. The IT developer had biked everywhere as a student in Rennes but felt overwhelmed by the bustling French capital. Cars were everywhere. Cyclists had almost no protection. But once authorities carved out space for a segregated bike lane on Boulevard Voltaire near his home in the 11th arrondissement, Roudaut returned to the two-wheel commute and did not look back. He now volunteers with Paris en Selle, a cycling campaign group, and has watched with wonder as the city has shaken off its car-centric reputation. “It was a process that started slow and really accelerated in the last 10 years,” Roudaut said. “At least in some parts of the city, we have a [cycle] network that is starting to be safe and pretty much complete.” Paris has embarked on a grand transformation since Anne Hidalgo became mayor in 2014, planting 155,000 trees, adding several hundred kilometres of bike lanes, pedestrianising 300 school streets and banning cars from the banks of the Seine. Parking spots have been turned into green spaces and terraces for cafes and bars. Fewer parents have to fear their child being run over when they walk to school. Hidalgo left office on Sunday 29 March after 12 years as mayor, and now her fight to make the city more livable has been held up as an example for progressive European cities as national governments roll back green policies. “When people ask me if I have any advice, I say don’t be afraid of being ambitious,” said Roudaut, who last year welcomed a delegation of Green politicians from Germany trying to understand why Paris was doing what Berlin could not. Even though Hidalgo achieved only part of her plan, he added, “everybody’s saying: ‘Look at what Paris has done, it’s so amazing.’” Parisians do not all feel the same. Efforts to make streets safer have taken space away from cars, sparking direct opposition from motorists, while referendums on charging SUV drivers more to park and pedestrianising more school streets were won with troublingly low turnouts. Before last month’s municipal elections, Rachida Dati, the mayoral candidate for the rightwing Les Républicains, criticised the chaos in public space as “anxiety-inducing”, though she stopped short of proposing to undo central policies. In a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian last week, Hidalgo said pedestrianising the city’s riverbanks had been “a tough battle” but now that it had happened people did not want to go back. “Today there are generations of children who have not known cars there. People say ‘wow!’ when you tell them,” she said. Experts say the transition was made easier by the city’s unusually tight administrative boundaries, which give commuter suburbs less say over its transport than in other capitals, as well as groundwork laid by previous mayors. But still courage was needed to push through policies that inconvenienced motorists while introducing shared social and environmental benefits. More could still be done but the changes so far are “fabulous”, said Audrey de Nazelle, an environmental epidemiologist at Imperial College London who grew up in Paris and returns frequently. She remembers when cycling was so rare “you could go and have coffee together” if you ran into someone else on a bike. “What’s missing in the rest of the world is courage,” she said. “Mayors could say: ‘This is my opportunity [to leave a] legacy,’ but most will not dare.” Paris is one of 19 global cities that achieved remarkable reductions in two toxic air pollutants between 2010 and 2024, a report last month found, although the list also includes a handful of neighbouring capitals with less progressive urban politics. Fine-particle pollution fell faster in Brussels and Warsaw over the same period, while nitrogen dioxide fell faster in London. Berlin, which last year opened a new stretch of motorway inside the city and voted to scrap 30km/h speed limits on 23 main streets, still has a higher share of cyclists than Paris. Rather than being exceptional, Paris has caught up with many other cities from a lower starting point, said Giulio Mattioli, a transport researcher at the Technical University of Dortmund, who used to live in Paris. “The conditions were there already, you just needed to make some bike lanes and people would use them,” he said. Cities across Europe saw a boom in cycling and bike-friendly infrastructure during the Covid-19 pandemic but have suffered setbacks amid a political shift to the right and the emergence of conspiracy theories that have unexpectedly taken aim at ideas such as having amenities within walking distance. While Paris proper has undergone a radical shift to becoming a “15-minute city”, the extensive suburbs are still dominated by cars and are cut off by a busy ring road. Analysis for the thinktank Terra Nova by Jean-Louis Missika, a former deputy mayor who served under Hidalgo and her predecessor, said transforming the Boulevard Périphérique that surrounds the city was essential to making Paris a post-car metropolis. “As long as this 35km motorway continues to encircle Paris, the Greater Paris metropolis will remain a figment of the imagination, an administrative construct devoid of urban reality,” he wrote. “Because a metropolis cannot be built by erecting walls between its inhabitants.”

Despite propaganda coup of F-15 crew rescue, downing is reminder to US that Iran can fight back

Donald Trump will inevitably claim the rescue of the second crew member of the downed F-15 fighter as a propaganda triumph, though the 48-hour drama is a reminder that an undefeated Iran is able to fight back and inflict costs on the US. It also ought to be a caution for a White House still contemplating whether to launch a ground operation in Iran to seize an island in the Persian Gulf – particularly if there a serious ambition to extract Iran’s highly enriched uranium from deep underground. The US-Israeli bombing of Iran has been so heavily skewed in the attackers’ favour that a single shoot-down, five weeks into the war, immediately became a significant problem for the Americans because it is so rare – and memorable. The last time a US warplane was shot down by hostile forces was in 2003, during the Iraq war. Though it is not exactly clear how the F-15E was brought down, the fact that it was is a reminder that the air superiority achieved by the US and Israeli air forces is not entirely absolute, even as they bomb Iran about 300 to 500 times a day. An F-15E Strike Eagle has a cost of $31m (though a new replacement could be $100m) but it is the rescue, far more high-risk than whatever mission the US warplane was on, where the difficulties clearly began. A decision to use an abandoned Iranian airstrip south of Isfahan as a forward operating location went wrong when two C-130 Hercules transporters, probably modified search and rescue variants, got stuck in the ground. They were destroyed by the US to prevent them falling into the Iranians’ hands, US sources indicated, and more transporters had to be brought forward to complete the extraction of the wounded second crew member. Each of the modified Hercules have a list price of nearly $115m. An HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter involved in the rescue was also damaged by gunfire on Friday – so it is easy to conclude that the cost in lost and damaged airframes exceeds $250m, largely for the rescue of the second crew member. In military terms, a single episode like this does not matter much to the US. Losing aircraft, whether shot down or in accidents, is part of war. The US had 218 F-15E Strike Eagles and 55 C-130s in its special force command before it attacked Iran, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. A full-scale US search and rescue operation was politically necessary to prevent Iran from capturing either member of the crew. The capture of one or both would have been a coup for Tehran, reviving memories of the US embassy hostage crisis of 1979-80, which did so much damage to the then president, Jimmy Carter. The point was underlined by Trump, who emphasised in a social media post, using capitals, that the US would never leave an American warfighter behind. It is an attractive commitment, but one that means further cost and risk will be incurred each time it is called upon. On this occasion Iranian forces failed to locate either of the F-15E crew. They were not able to contest the US’s use of the abandoned airbase south of Isfahan, though this could have been because of Reaper drones loitering overhead, which, according to US briefings, were there to kill any Iranian males getting within 3km. But the enforced loss of the rescue C-130 transports is a reminder of the greater risks inherent in any US ground operation in Iran. Could it really be feasible for US special forces to seize the 440kg of highly enriched uranium thought to be hidden underground in canisters at Isfahan and fly them away without major incident? There is no doubt that Iran – bombed in excess of 15,000 times so far – is being battered by the relentless US and Israeli airstrikes. But Tehran can still turn relatively small US or Israeli losses into a propaganda victory, whatever the state of its troops or air defences, precisely because they have been infrequent. In an asymmetric conflict, the weaker side only has to get lucky once.

Lorna Richmond obituary

My friend Lorna Richmond, who has died aged 96, worked for many years at the Africa Bureau in London, an independent body that co-operated with liberation movements to bring about an end to empire on that continent. As assistant to the bureau’s maverick director, the Rev Michael Scott, an Anglican priest known for leading passive resistance demonstrations in a way that often ensured his arrest and imprisonment in various countries, Lorna kept the organisation running on the home front. The period of her full employment, from the 1950s to mid-60s, was arguably the busiest and most successful time in the bureau’s history. While Scott was in Africa assessing the demands for independence in places such as Kenya, the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and South West Africa (now Namibia), Lorna and the London team were busy organising fundraising events, meeting delegations from African nations, and keeping a constant stream of politicians and journalists informed. Born in Stratford, east London, Lorna was the daughter of George Richmond, a staff engineer at the Gas Light and Coke company, and his wife, Mary. After secondary education at a boarding school near Bishop’s Stortford, in Hertfordshire, Lorna attended secretarial college. She then spent three years with family in Canada, working as a secretary, before returning to the UK. While doing secretarial temp work in London, Lorna took a course in international relations before starting full-time with the Africa Bureau, originally set up by David Astor, the then editor of the Observer, in 1952. Lorna served there for the major part of Scott’s 16 years as director until a funding crisis meant she had to leave, along with others, to save money. When Scott himself stepped down from leadership of the Bureau in 1968, Lorna continued to look after his affairs and interests in other organisations he was involved in, such as the Africa Publications Trust, the Africa Educational Trust, and the Minority Rights Group. Rarely of fixed abode, when in London Scott would stay with friends or in cheap bed and breakfast accommodation, until in 1970 Lorna offered him residence in the spare room of her flat in Primrose Hill, north London. The arrangement continued until Scott died in 1983. Lorna then moved into her elderly mother’s home in the village of Kingston, close to Lewes, East Sussex, while continuing to travel regularly to London to attend meetings of the Friends of Namibia. In 1992 she welcomed Archbishop Desmond Tutu to St Pancras, a tiny church in Kingston, where she had had Scott’s ashes interred, to unveil a new stained-glass window dedicated to his memory. Lorna and I became friends when I co-wrote, with Anne Yates, a book entitled The Troublemaker: Michael Scott and His Lonely Struggle Against Injustice (2006), for which she became one of our main sources of information. Lorna’s younger brother, Marcus, predeceased her. She is survived by a niece, Vanessa.

US rescues second crew member of downed F-15E fighter jet from Iran

The second crew member of a downed F-15E fighter jet has been rescued from an Iranian mountain by US commandos overnight, ending a two-day search after the warplane crashed in south-west Iran. The crew member, a colonel and weapons systems officer, had been wounded but was successfully rescued from a mountain hideout by US special forces, Donald Trump first announced in a social media post soon after midnight. The US president called it “one of most daring search-and-rescue operations in US history” – and claimed that not a “single American” had been killed or wounded in the operation. Trump said he would hold a press conference in the White House on Monday “with the Military” to provide more detail. In a subsequent social media post, he threatened Iran with the bombing of its power plants and bridges on Tuesday if Tehran did not open the strait of Hormuz to merchant shipping. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” he wrote. In a subsequent interview with the Wall Street Journal the president added that all the country’s power plants would be destroyed, adding that Iranian civilians wanted that to happen because they were “living in hell”. Trump also described the F-15 crew member as “seriously wounded, and really brave” on Sunday. The officer was a “highly respected Colonel” who had been picked up in the “type of raid is seldom attempted because of the danger to ‘man and equipment’”. Once located hiding in the mountains, having at one point climbed a 7,000ft (2,135-metre) ridge, the colonel was rescued by a 200-strong special forces team under a hail of heavy covering fire. Three Revolutionary Guards were killed, according to Iranian sources. Iran’s military said on Sunday that it had destroyed four US aircraft involved in the search operation and that the Americans had used an abandoned airstrip south of Isfahan as a base. State media shared images of charred wreckage scattered across a desert area, with smoke still emanating from the site. Two $115m (£85m) modified Hercules had to be destroyed in Iran because they had run into difficulties, having become bogged down in the ground, according to US media. Three more transport planes had to be flown in to complete the extraction. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, highlighted the cost of the lost aircraft with an apparent photograph of the wreckage: “If the United States gets three more victories like this, it will be utterly ruined.” Iran also said two Black Hawk helicopters were destroyed on the ground while a Reaper and Hermes-900 drones were shot down from the sky. Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated the US leader. The Israeli prime minister said: “As a nation that repeatedly carried out daring rescue operations, and as someone who was wounded in such a mission and lost a brother in the Entebbe rescue, Israelis and I, we know what a bold decision you took.” Footage emerged of what was said to be night-time clashes in Iran’s Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, near the city of Dehdasht, about 30 miles from the coast in the south-west of the country, the area where US searches had been taking place. The pilot of the aircraft had been rescued on Friday, after the F-15E Strike Eagle became the first US plane to be downed over Iran during the five-week-long war. On Sunday, Trump said the pilot had been rescued “in broad daylight” having spent seven hours on the ground in Iran. The US air force had launched a massive search-and-rescue effort, using low-flying Pave Hawk helicopters and specialist C-130 Hercules transport planes. The CIA took more than a day to locate the missing airman and launched a disinformation campaign in Iran to give the impression that he had been found in order to fool Iranian forces on the ground. Uncrewed Reaper drones were used to protect the crew member once he had been located, by “striking Iranian military-aged males believed to be a threat who got within three kilometers”, according to a correspondent with the US Air & Space Forces Magazine, who said he had been briefed on the operation. Once found, using what Trump called “beeping information”, there were for a time concerns that the airman was in Iranian captivity and rescue commandos were being lured into a trap. Military pilots said the missing F-15 crew member would have been trying to hide for as long as possible from the Iranian military. If possible, the colonel would have tried to transmit their location relative to a known secret point in the hope that US special forces coming in via helicopter would be able to rescue them. Iran said it had shot the F-15 down on Friday, a point confirmed by Trump who told Axios it had been hit with a shoulder fired missile. The US military is yet to publicly comment. Trump previously said the episode would not affect efforts to negotiate a peace settlement with Iran. The US military had not had a jet shot down by enemy fire in more than 20 years – since a warplane was downed during the 2003 invasion of Iraq – retired air force Brig Gen Houston Cantwell told the Associated Press. Iranian media released pictures of the wreckage of a plane, including a distinctive F-15 tail fin, and a used ejector seat on Friday, with state media and businesses in the country offering a bounty if the missing crew member could be captured. It also emerged that a Pave Hawk helicopter was hit by fire from the ground during the rescue of the pilot on Friday, but was able to fly away. Another combat plane, an A-10 Warthog attack aircraft, crashed near the strait of Hormuz with Iran claiming it had shot it down. Its pilot was rescued. The loss of the F-15 and other aircraft had come as a relative surprise, given the air superiority the US and Israel have established over Iran from the beginning of the five-week-long war. But it demonstrated that after thousands of bombing missions, Iran still has the capacity to inflict high-profile damage on the US. Trump said the US would never leave an American warfighter behind, committing the country’s military to similar rescue efforts if any more planes are brought down. Meanwhile, heavy bombing of Iran continued. Israel attacked several facilities at Mahshahr, a petrochemical complex in Khuzestan province, on Saturday, and on Sunday Iranian officials said that production there had been shut down. Five people were reported killed and 170 injured. Israel also attacked Lebanon, having issued a warning that people should evacuate at least 300 metres away from a building in southern Beirut that it said was affiliated with Hezbollah. Eleven people were recorded by the Lebanese authorities as killed in a strike on Kfar Hatta, 30 miles north of the border with Israel. A fire broke out at the Borouge petrochemical plant in the United Arab Emirates after falling debris from a missile interception caused a blaze, prompting operations at the facility to be suspended. A fire was extinguished at a storage tank belonging to Bahrain’s state energy company, the company said on Sunday. A building in Haifa, northern Israel, was destroyed by an Iranian missile and an 82-year-old man seriously injured on Sunday. It also emerged that the Aero Sol drone factory in Petah Tikva had been destroyed by an Iranian missile on Thursday.