Iran says it has shot down US fighter jet

This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Ankara Sai and at 16 GMT on 5th of April, these are our main stories. Iran says it has shot down US fighter jets over the west of the country. There's been no official confirmation from the Pentagon, but an unnamed US official is being quoted as saying that a search is underway for the crew. It comes as Iran has also continued its attacks on its golf neighbours, striking critical infrastructure in Kuwait after President Trump threatened to further escalate the American bombing campaign. Also coming up in this podcast, beginner Fasas leader tells people that they can forget about democracy and is rolled back on plans to hold elections. And we also look at South Sudan's rapidly worsening security and humanitarian crisis. Over 540 children have been registered by unicephan protection partners as being unaccompanied, so separate from their families and then we have this issue of abduction which is terrifying for mothers who lose their children and mothers overall. We begin the podcast with the latest in the Middle East. Iran says it has shot down a US fighter jet over the west of the country. At the time of recording there's been no official confirmation from the Pentagon, but an unnamed US official is being quoted as saying that a search is underway for the crew. If the incident is confirmed, it would be the first time since the beginning of the war that a US jet has been shot down over Iran. Mikey Kay, host of the security brief on BBC News, gave Tim Franks this update. This first came to light on some very credible open-source intelligence channels about the claims of Iran shooting down an aircraft. It was originally reported that it was at what's called an F-35, fifth-generation fighter, but on looking at the debris on open-source intelligence, it's quite clear that the symbology and the markings on a specific part of the wreckage, which was the top end of the tailfin. The tailfin Tim, an F-15E basically has two tail fins and the markings from the livery, which is basically a red strip through to a badge, which is USaff in Europe badge, that basically aligns that debris, the striking similarity between that debris and the an F-15 strike vehicle from the 494 fighter squadron, which is part of the 48 fighter wing base at RAF Lake and Heathenburg. And how many crew would there be on board typically? Let me just talk to you about what the F-15E is. It's a strike vehicle, it's a pretty large jet, but it is air-to-air and air-to-ground capable, which means that it's being used and there has been user-generated footage that have seen the F-15 doing what's called drone cap, which is drone combat air patrol. So basically, F-15's airborne looking for Shahed 136 drones coming across the Iraqi border. We know they've been doing that. We know that some three F-15s have also been shot down earlier on in Operation Epic Fury by Friendly Fire. So we know that those F-15s from the 494 are in the region and they're on combat operations every day, but I think it's important to note here that whilst there are three US officials basically confirming that there has been a shoot down, we don't know why it's been shot down or how it's been shot down. We don't know if it's from enemy fire, we don't know if it's from Friendly Fire, we don't know if there was a technical fault and the geo-location of the debris has not been cooperated yet, but where I go back to open source channels, there is suggestion from open source that it's Kazakhstan Province, which is a province in Iran, which is literally right up to the Iraqi border. So when you start joining the dots on this type of investigative work, the dots do kind of make sense. There's also been combat search and rescue that have been put up and looking for the crew that would have likely ejected. In another development officials in Kuwait, say an Iranian missile has damaged a power and desalination plant. That comes as Donald Trump is threatening ever greater destruction, including striking power plants and bridges, unless Iran does a deal. The escalation comes, despite international law experts, warning of serious violations by the US, Israel and Iran. A civilian infrastructure is targeted. First, here's our correspondent Katie Watson in Doha in Qatar. On the latest there and across the UAE. Kuwait had a few hits overnight, the early this morning, the Ministry of Electricity and Water, the Centre for Power and Water Desalination Plant was attacked. There was material damage to some components and they also had an attack on a key oil refinery, Minal Ahmadi. It's one of the largest in the Middle East. It has a capacity of about 350,000 barrels of oil a day. It's also been targeted before and that's just Q8. The war alarms went off in the UAE and Bahrain, an attack in the UAE on a gas facility. So clearly what we're seeing and continue to see is this retaliation by Iran and the Gulf continues to fill those effects. Yes, the Gulf nations have warned Iran against targeting water plants as you mentioned there. Is there a sense of growing anger in the region? Certainly, I think there's frustration, nobody knows authorities really speak publicly, but there is a sense of wanting, obviously this war to be over, but wanting a threat of Iran to be over, is talking to some cuttery officials early this week who made clear that attacks on civilian infrastructure such as desalination is a huge threat to the region. This is a part of the world that what 90% of drinking water roughly comes from desalinated water. So if you don't have access to that then it makes the region pretty unlivable pretty quickly and that is a concern here certainly. And what about the mood where you are Katie? How much is normal life being affected? Have you been able to gauge a sense of how people are feeling? It's much quieter than it normally is, that's for sure. It doesn't feel particularly kind of vibrant at the moment. Obviously there were people who decided to leave when the war started, some of those people might be coming back. Obviously there's a lot of catteries who are still here, this is their home. But I think it's difficult because the authorities are trying to make it clear that they're safe, that they're doing their best to defend themselves. Perhaps foreigners might feel a little less certain about that, but overall people are getting on with their lives, just might be that there are fewer people here right now. Katie Watson reporting from Doha. Well on Thursday the US and Israel struck one of Iran's biggest unfinished bridge projects. Iranian authorities say eight people were killed nearly a hundred injured, and what is likely to raise fresh questions about attacks on infrastructure that blurs the line between military and civilian targets. BBC Persian have managed to make contact with some people in Iran, on what they think about the destruction of the bridge. I feel hopeless. Trump posts shamelessly about attacking our bridge. I don't know how much further this is going to go. Why is no one standing up to him? He's really taking us back to the Stone Age. We will end up with a ruined country. I'm more disappointed and saddened that I'm in a middle of a situation where I see Iran being destroyed and I can't do anything. My country is being destroyed more and more every day. That bridge could have reduced the traffic in the city. It was destroyed in the second strike. This strike has got me worried. I don't know why they hit it. I was really surprised that they hit it. But I think they must have a reason for it. International humanitarian law says attacks must distinguish between combatants and civilians. The US and Israel insists their only targeting sites linked to Iran's military or security apparatus. But the UN's humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher strongly condemned the strategy. This has been a gradual and then very sudden deterioration in the way that we talk about protection of civilians, the way that we talk about international humanitarian law. This stuff isn't negotiable. You don't hit civilian infrastructure. That includes hospitals across Beirut and across Lebanon. I met huge numbers of medics whose ambulances are being hit at the moment. You don't hit schools. You don't hit energy sources. You don't hit bridges. Those are war crimes. That is absolutely clear in international law. But somewhere along the way, we seem to have thrown that all aside and we've chosen impunity, indifference, game show gambling over solidarity and humanity. We also achieve international correspondence at least to set. What were to make of the kind of sites being hit? We heard from President Trump in his first prime time address during this conflict in the early hours of, I guess, say morning that he was in his bombastic language going to bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages. A comment that's been criticized both by legal experts warning about potential war crimes also causing growing alarm among Iranians, even those who had dared to hope that the beginning of this war would mean the beginning of the end of the regime. He did say that if Iran didn't come to a deal that they would hit every single one of their power pants, again, and other potential war crimes. Then they've started hitting the bridges and he has celebrated the hitting of this bridge, which linked Tehran with the nearby major city of Karajan and his latest post on truth. So he goes, "Briges next, electric power plants, then electric power plants." And then he said, "He knows, Iran's leadership knows what it has to be done and done fast." And it's not just the bridges, Dr. Tedros, who heads the World Health Organization, which, of course, the US President Trump had pulled out of the WHO, but he has regularly been expressing concern about the attacks on health facilities. The most recent is the century old pastoral health center. It's a major public health agency that had been producing and distributing vaccines. And Dr. Tedros reported that it had suffered significant damage. There was a report that Iran was using the center for other military-related activities, or other kinds of research, but it has been widely condemned as an unacceptable targeting in this war. You've been asking about what is Iran going to do in retaliation because, of course, Israel has been expressing concern about where the missiles are landing there. Gulf states, of course, are furious about attacks on their infrastructure. And we did hear from the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammad Bakr Kali-Baf, who regularly hits back against President Trump on social media. He used that biblical expression, eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth in this war. So the language is escalating. And in a war where President Trump has again said, his deadlines are always fluid, that there would be another two to three weeks. His targeting on both sides, on all sides, raises questions about what is going to be hit next. At least do set reporting. The UN says food prices have risen to their highest level in six months, and could increase further if the war in the Middle East continues. The food and agriculture organization said higher all prices were mostly to blame. Several countries have mandated working from home and raise petrol prices with restricted passage through the strait of Hormuz affecting their ability to import oil and gas. Pakistan's government has raised fuel prices by further 43% overnight. Caroline Davies has more from Islamabad. This is a dramatic increase in the price of fuel here in Pakistan, and the government here is tying it directly to the war in Iran. Now Pakistan is highly dependent on imported oil, a large amount of which comes through the strait of Hormuz. And in fact this is the second time that Pakistan's government has increased the price of fuel since the conflict began, which means that petrol has now increased 77% since the beginning of this conflict and diesel by 87%. Now Pakistan's government did announce some subsidies for certain groups including motorcycle users, small farmers, passenger buses amongst them. But the major concern is that this will filter into inflation and many here in Pakistan will already be making assessments about how often and how far they travel. Caroline Davies reporting. And we have more on this on our YouTube channel, just search for BBC News on YouTube, and you'll find the Global News Podcast in the Podcast section. There's a new story available every weekday. A French court has overturned an attempt by the government there to ban a Muslim event which is expected to draw tens of thousands of people over the weekend. The annual meeting of French Muslims started as planned this afternoon, despite the police warning of the risk of terrorism. He's scoffered reports. Part cultural and religious conference, part trade fair, this event is organized by an association called Muslims of France, which critics say is linked to the international Muslim brotherhood. The French government is on principle ill disposed to it because it fears the group promotes separatism. But the reason given for trying to enforce a ban was the international context, the war on Iran and an increasingly polarized political atmosphere in France. The risk of terrorism against Muslims could not be ignored the government said. Far right groups might seek to disrupt proceedings and foreign influences might try to stage a provocation. But the organizers sought an injunction to overturn the ban and just in time they got it. The court ruling that police had failed to substantiate that there was a serious risk to public order. For the organizers, the suspicion is that the government was looking for a reason to have the assembly stopped. He's scoffered reporting. So, it's a communist podcast. They don't meet often and octopuses actually don't interact often. They're solitary. When they do interact, they're very aggressive. And so we wanted to observe meeting in the lab. The new findings on how octopuses meet. This is the Global News Podcast. Next, Bukhina Fasa's leader has told the people there they can forget about democracy in an interview on National TV. Captain Ibrahim Treyoray rolled back on plans to hold elections despite promising them four years ago when he seized power. His rights record has come under a lot of criticism, most recently by Human Rights Watch. Its new report says the government and allied forces have killed more than twice as many civilians as Islamist militants in the past few years. Ilaria Alifrozi is a senior researcher on the report and told us the death toll is likely to be much higher and that government forces are more brutal and violent than the militants. Military abuse creates a cycle of grievances, frustrations and resentment, especially among the most affected communities which can fuel recruitment into the ranks of the Islamist armed groups, which are actually serving and exploiting this kind of military abuse for Tehropaganda. A Global Affairs correspondent Richard Kagoi is in Nairobi and told me more. Ibrahim Treyoray is, you would say, young. He's in his later 30s. Considered to be one of the youngest African leaders, you know where the average age is about 65 years. He has sort of built a persona around himself as a Pan-African leader who's out to liberate the West African country from the influences of what he calls Western imperialism and Neocolonialism. So what he has done is he has made radical reforms and policies in terms of nationalizing the country's mind sector, which is a very richer in gold. And he says he wants to establish gold reserves. And so this has really endeared him particularly to young people, not only just in Bukina Faso, but also across Africa. So a lot of them see him as the revolutionary reader, or that was Thomas Ankara, who was the leader there in the later 1980s. He's been able to build his personality using social media. He's reflecting what people say is perhaps a political shift that's taking place across the continent. And he's a pill also goes even just beyond Africa. He seems to be resonating with African Americans, you know, black pretense. Yeah, so he's been able to do that over a period of time since he sees that power in a military coup. So it seems a real sense of cult of personality with him, but is this like to last and what sort of reaction has there been to him? I mean opinion is divided. A lot of people are really conflicted about him. So he's got a decent promise in terms of the way that he has approached his governance. That's what a lot of people say, perhaps, you know, breaking with a pastor with how African leaders seem to be done. But a lot of people are saying, even with the changes that he's doing in terms of the country's mineral wealth. It's an essence in terms of consolidating power and wealth for himself and therefore people around him. You know, as you mentioned that he's a human rights record has come under scrutiny. He's mazold critical voices. He suspended international news and outlets and suspended even the journalists. You can see there's been a systematic, you know, dismantling of democratic institutions, including the country's electoral commission and political parties as well. Richard Kagoi reporting from Nairobi. South Sudan is facing a rapidly worsening security and humanitarian crisis. Fist fighting since December 2025 between government forces and opposition fighters has forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. Ted Chavan is UNICEF's deputy executive director and is visiting South Sudan this week and is among the first senior UN officials to reach some of the remote conflict effectiveness. He's been speaking to James Coppino about what he saw there. So I was in the Zhongle area of South Sudan. That's in the Northeast where much of the fighting has taken place and there's now over 286,000 displays. And we went to a small village called Shriil in northern Zhongle. The population is normally 6,000 people. In the last two months, this has expanded to 30,000 people with the displaced taking refuge there. And up the river, there's another 25,000 people in nearby village. And what we saw as a population really in very bad shape. We met a mother called Jawat and she was eating leaves from the tree under which she was sitting for sustenance. She had a small baby in her lap. But as she was running away from her village, she had lost her five-year-old son, Garwish, because he had been abducted and she would just look gone and just completely devastated by losing her son. We then went to another place called We Eye, about an hour away by plane. And there everything had been looted. The health center, the water point had been destroyed. It's one of the 26 health centers that we know have been destroyed during this fighting. So it's not just the civilians that are paying the price. It's the civilian infrastructure on which they depend. That is also the problem. destroyed. Luckily, there's some very good actors on the ground that are responding local NGOs, international NGOs, the UN agencies such as UNICEF, but much more is needed. And particularly I would imagine for children, the immediate disaster perhaps, of fleeing one's home, but it's been quite hard, historically, to get kids into school in South Sudan in the best of times. Now with so much displacement, I imagine many children will be missing out on an education. The schools are closed. I mean, in the country as a whole, even before this crisis, more children were out of school than in schools. And this is further impacting their education. None of the children displaced are in school and in jungle. We're doing some early kind of learning and play activities, but it's not a substitute for the stability, the normal CEO being in school. And I have to say, we're also facing a protection crisis. Over 540 children have been registered by UNICEF and protection partners as being unaccompanied, so separate from their families. And then we have this issue of abduction, which is terrifying for mothers who lose their children and mothers overall. Both the government and the opposition have signed action plan to desist from recruiting and using children and their forces. We've also called on the parties to de-escalate and return to a political dialogue. There needs to be a political way forward. There needs to be full access for humanitarian on the ground. That's UNICEF's deputy executive director Ted Chaiban speaking to James Coppano. Holy week leading up to Easter in Jerusalem has been a sub-duty fair this year, as the war against Iran continues. It's been the same story for Muslims with Eid and now Israeli Jews with Passover. Pilgrims and tourists have stayed away while sacred sites with immense significance for billions of Christians, Muslims and Jews around the world have been closed in the old city. But the spirit of Jerusalem has survived, as our correspondence of Asshia has been finding out. Welcome back. It's good to be back. Yes, very quiet. Old friends meeting up again in the Christian quarter in the old city, lamenting events that have made Holy week leading up to Easter a shadow of itself. Easter, Jerusalem, resident whose family has lived here for generations, tries to be hopeful, as befits the man known, as the city's one and only Santa Claus. Whatever happened, still Jerusalem, you can feel the heart still beating. With him, a Tom and Samantha, an American cup looping coming here for Easter for the past eight years and were not going to be put off this year. It's so powerful to be in the place where where Jesus walked, where all of the Holy Week events literally took place. So that is so moving to us. We felt like this is something we're supposed to do. So we were feeling a little frustrated because we did try to come and the flights got canceled and we felt really strongly because we come to pray. The events need prayer. So for Samantha and I felt like something very important to do right now, but yeah, it feels different. Our families definitely felt more trepidation about it. I'm standing here in what is normally especially during Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter, one of the busiest parts of the old city of Jerusalem. Very, very unlike any time that I've seen here before in the old city, just looking to my left, I see the gateway which leads into the Church of Aholi Sepulchre. That's close. There are two guards who are stopping people from going in there. This is a very, very different sense of what the city normally represents for Christians around the world. Three weeks ago, a fragment from an Iranian missile made impact on the edge of the old city, just a few hundred meters from the Church of Aholi Sepulchre, Al-Aqsa and the Western Wall, all closed for fear of mass casualties, were a missile to strike during mass religious gatherings. So on Palm Sunday, the Church of Beth Page up on the Mount of Olives held a mass for local Christians. The bejoyous procession with thousands of worshipers from near and far holding palms that normally sets off from there was cancelled. The destination is traditionally the Church of Aholi Sepulchre, at the same time that mass was being held in Beth Page. The Latin patriarch Cardinal Pierre Batista Pizzabala was denied entry to Jerusalem's most revered church by Israeli police. The incident sparked an international outcry. The break in centuries old tradition was also felt deeply by local Christians like Issa. "It's make me feel sad first as a butler because he is a leader of the head church of Jerusalem. Like this is like his house, it's like my house and also this is his house. He's more an important person for Jerusalem. This is like he going home. You cannot tell someone don't go to your home." Two days later inside the Latin patriarchy, Cardinal Pizzabala played the incident down as a misunderstanding. The limited mass he was due to hold on Palm Sunday, the Church of Aholi Sepulchre is now being allowed to go ahead on Easter Sunday and he reiterated how he and other religious leaders accepted the wartime restrictions but grieved that Holy Week felt bereft. "The Jerusalem down here is not complete. You see that it's almost dead, a place of life but without life at this moment which is very safe." Sebastian Asher reporting from Jerusalem. Now the octopus is one of the sea's most fascinating creatures, intelligent, elusive and still not fully understood. One of the questions that has long puzzled scientists is how it reproduces. Now researchers at Harvard say they've uncovered part of that mystery, specifically how the male succeeds in mating. My colleague Tim Frank spoke to Professor Nicholas Ballano, the senior author of the study published in the journal Science. He began by explaining what the process actually looks like. "The male has one specialized arm. It's the third arm from the right and it uses this arm not only to identify the female but then it inserts the arm into the female mantle and then the arm searches around the internal organs and finds the overduct and then once it finds the overduct both the male and the female freeze and then the male passes a sperm out of which is a package of sperm from its mantle down the link that the specialized arm to the overduct and then that's one fertilization happens." Right and just to be clear the mantle is this sort of bulbous structure of the eye. "The eye has." Yes the head. How does the male know when it sort of hit the right part as it were and what have you discovered on that? We discovered this kind of by accident so they don't make often and octopus is actually don't interact often they're solitary when they do interact they're very aggressive and so we wanted to observe mating in the lab and so our idea was to put two octopuses into one tank but be mindful that they are aggressive together so we put a barrier between them and then we put little holes in that barrier so that they could sort of get used to one another and recognize that there is an octopus in the tank and then our plan was to remove the barrier so they could mate. However the male octopus was able to put the specialized mating arm through one of those holes find the female in initiate mating so this told us already that they were able to mate without visual information because they were blocked by this barrier and they could do the same thing in complete darkness so the discovery even at that point is that the specialized arm for mating is actually a sensor of the female and that led to the rest of the study which is to define how it serves as a sensory organ which was unknown. Your research and I'm not in any way sort of downplaying it but it's essentially it's all about sort of trying to work out how the the male is you know response to stimuli and is satisfied and and decides where he's going to stick his tentacle. Is there any suggestion or interest in how female octopuses decide that they're going to allow a male to mate with them? Oh yeah definitely this is a really interesting part of the system so there's two things that the female does that contributes to selection of a mate. One is the behavioral aspect that we watched with this barrier where she will accept or not accept the male to find her with the hactoralis and initiate mating so she can swim away if she doesn't like that particular male and then the other part that's really interesting to me is that she also can select which sperm she uses to fertilize the egg so even from wild caught females can look in the of it, find a difference sperm from different octopuses of the same species also even some octopuses of different species will try to cross mate and [BLANK_AUDIO] and she can save the sperm for a really long time and then decide not only when to fertilize the eggs, but which sperm to select. - Professor Nicholas Ballono. (upbeat music) And that's all from us for now. If you want to get in touch, you can, you can just email us at [email protected]. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service and you can use the hashtag globalnewspod. And don't forget our sister podcast. It's called the Global Story, which goes in depth and beyond the headlines on one big story. This edition of the Global News Podcast was mixed by Nick Randall and the producer was Charles Sanctuary. The editor is Karen Martin and I'm Uncle Decide. Until next time, goodbye. (upbeat music)