A Peruvian Air Force A-37 fighter jet attacked their pontoon plane, mistaking it for a drug flight.
The plane was mistaken for an F-14 fighter plane that had been sold to Iran before the 1979 revolution.
As it appears that the plane was mistaken for a military aircraft, the main basis for criminal liability would be recklessness or criminal negligence, argues Payam Akhavan, a professor of international law at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Suzanne LaFata, the owner of a software training company in Orlando, Fla., who flies about 100,000 miles a year on business, says that seven times in the last year alone, men on planes have mistaken her for a flight attendant and asked her to hang up their coats.
A team of Dutch police and military investigators were deployed last month to Ukraine's Donetsk region to examine cellphone towers and communications data believed to show that Russia-backed militants claimed to have shot down the plane in the mistaken belief it was a Ukrainian military transport.
One afternoon we were strafed by a squadron of Allied fighter planes that mistook our column for Wehrmacht troops.
One afternoon we were strafed by a squadron of Allied fighter planes who mistook our column for Wermacht troops.
Brazilian officials said one reason for the delay was concern in the United States that innocent planes could be mistaken for those of drug dealers and shot down, as occurred in Peru last year.
The report does not assign direct fault for the April 20 crash, which occurred after the plane had been initially mistaken for a drug flight by a surveillance plane operated by the Central Intelligence Agency and after a Peruvian military jet had fired on the smaller craft.
However, in 2009 two investigative journalists in Prague claimed the plane had probably been mistaken for an enemy aircraft and shot down by the Czechoslovakian air force, causing it to fall and break up at a much lower height than previously believed.
