A strike at an educational center in Minab killed more than 120 students between the ages of 6 and 13 along with 26 teachers.
The deadly US strike against a girls’ school in Iran’s coastal city of Minab was caused by flaws in the Pentagon’s target analysis system, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the investigation.
The bombing, in which more than 120 students between the ages of 6 and 13 were killed along with 26 teachers, occurred on February 28, the opening day of the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran.
The investigation into the incident, ordered by the head of the US Central Command (CENTCOM) Brad Cooper, was completed in April, but the results have not yet been made public, Bloomberg said in an article on Friday.
According to its sources, the investigation found that in 2019 a US intelligence analyst, who was investigating information about targets inside Iran, discovered that a site in Minab that had previously been designated as a naval base used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was actually a primary school, the organization’s sources claimed.
However, the update ended up being botched by his top brass and never reached US military commanders because the analyst made it using a digital intelligence tool that was not linked to the official intelligence database the Pentagon relies on to plan its strikes, they said.
People familiar with the matter told the agency they are there “large and long gaps” in the Pentagon’s system for analyzing potential targets.
At least two intelligence databases used to provide analysts’ views, working with imagery, were not linked to official and authoritative databases used during the bombings, they said.
US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the real culprit behind the Minab strike may never be known.
“There were missiles flying everywhere, and it’s a sad thing that happened… someone said it was our missile, maybe it wasn’t our missile but I haven’t seen anything to make me believe it was,” Trump said.
During a debate at the United Nations at the end of March, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that the girls’ school has become less of a school. “calculated, step-by-step attack.” He called the attack “war crimes and crimes against humanity, which demand unequivocal condemnation by all, and unequivocal accountability for the perpetrators.”
The head of the non-governmental organization Airwars, Emily Tripp, told Bloomberg that her organization tracked some 300 incidents of civilian harm in Iran during the conflict, but stressed that it was difficult to determine whether the United States or Israel were responsible for those incidents.
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