Swedish aviation authorities would allow flight to Kurdistan region.
Swedish aviation authorities said on Thursday they would allow one airline to
resume flights to northern Iraq, nearly six months after all Swedish flights to
the country were grounded following a suspected missile attack on a plane.
"The Swedish Civil Aviation Authority has decided to issue a traffic permit to
Viking Airlines for regular flights from Sweden to Arbil in Iraq," the agency
said in a statement.
"We will resume the flights shortly," Viking Airlines said in a separate
statement, adding that "initially, we will operate from Stockholm and
Copenhagen."
The Swedish aviation authority grounded all Swedish flights to Iraq on August
10, a day after the pilots of a Nordic Airways MD-83 aircraft reported seeing
flashes of light after taking off from Sulaimaniyah Airport in northern Iraq.
Aviation officials from Iraq's Kurdish region have dismissed reports that the
airliner was targeted, but Swedish officials said there was no doubt the
airliner had been fired upon.
"We can't prove it, but we have three people in the cockpit who said they saw
it. It is clear that it was some form of shelling. But we don't know if they
(the attackers) knew it was a Swedish plane," he told AFP at the time.
He said the plane was at an altitude of 1,400 metres (4,500 feet) when the
incident occurred.
Viking Airlines and Nordic Airways, which at the time were the only Swedish
carriers flying to Iraq, had along with several other companies applied to
resume flights to the north of the country.
Viking Airlines was however the only firm to receive authorisation.
"Our decision was based on among other things the Foreign Ministry's report on
the security situation in the area and on a security analysis from the airline,"
the aviation authority said, adding that the permit was good until March 29 and
would be retracted if the situation in the region worsened.
