Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday it was unclear what caused a British military transport plane to crash in Iraq with the presumed loss of all 10 servicemen on board. "Let me again express my sympathy and condolences to the families of those that have died," Blair told the ITV television station. "We don't yet know the exact cause of the crash. We hope we will be able to give people more details of that in due course." Insurgents claim to have shot down the Hercules aircraft north of Baghdad on Sunday, and Al-Jazeera television has aired a videotape from them showing flaming wreckage of a plane. Britain's Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, said late Monday that a senior investigator was on his way to Iraq, where staff on the ground were already sifting through the wreckage. "I am aware that there is a great deal of speculation about what caused that crash, not least because of the video, purporting to be of a missile shooting down an aircraft," Stirrup told Sky News TV. "We all want to know what caused it and we all want to know that as quickly as we can, but we have to find out the facts. We have set up an investigation to look into it." The Hercules was on an administrative flight between Baghdad and a U.S. air base at Balad when it crashed at 16:35 local time (13:35 GMT) 30 kilometers (19 miles) northwest of Baghdad on Sunday, the Ministry of Defense has said.
