Iran says missing pilots are prisoners in Qatar

Iran's foreign ministry said on Monday it would regard three missing pilots as prisoners in Qatar until Doha clarifies what happened to them, despite Qatar's denial that it is holding them.

Foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei told a weekly briefing that Tehran considered clarification of the pilots' situation essential. "Until the pilots' situation is clarified, we consider them prisoners and will spare no effort to shed light on their fate," he said.

Tehran has said the Iranians went missing while carrying out an operation against the United States' Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar on March 2, shortly after the outbreak of the Middle East war. On Saturday, Iranian authorities alleged for the first time that the pilots had been captured in Qatar, after previously saying one pilot had been killed and three others were missing after their sortie.

Qatar denies holding the pilots. It said an invitation had been sent to Iran to be briefed on details of search-and-rescue operations in April, but that Iran had not yet responded.

General Mohammad Bagherzadeh of the Iranian armed forces said on Sunday that an Iranian Air Force expert team had been waiting for several months to travel to Qatar for an on-site investigation. He accused Qatari authorities of delaying the team's travel and said the pilots' return remained impossible as a result. Fars news agency had reported that he named the pilots as Javad Salehi, Abdolmajid Dashtian and Omran Behraveshian.

Iran's military said last month it had retrieved the body of pilot Majid Kazemi, who it said was killed during the attack on Al Udeid. The base is the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East and hosts forward elements of U.S. Central Command, as well as U.S. air and special operations forces.

In early March, Qatar's defence ministry said it had shot down two Iranian Sukhoi Su-24 bombers. It was not immediately clear whether they were the same aircraft referred to by Iran.

Qatar and other countries in the region faced retaliatory attacks after U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran triggered the war on February 28. Diplomatic efforts led to an April ceasefire that ended nearly 40 days of fighting, followed by a framework for peace talks in June that later collapsed.

Iran and the United States have since traded occasional fire, with strikes mainly centred in southern Iran and around the Strait of Hormuz. Qatar, which took part in mediation efforts to end the fighting, came under fire after the truce broke down and reported attacks on its territory and on at least one Qatari tanker transiting the strait.