That accounting has not arrived. The case remains officially unsolved.
## The Shootdown Theory: What the Journalists Claimed and Why Experts Rejected It
In 2009, two journalists — Peter Hornung and Pavel Theiner — published claims that challenged the official accident investigation’s conclusion. Their argument was that JAT Flight 367 had not been destroyed by a bomb at cruising altitude but had instead been shot down by a Czechoslovak MiG fighter jet at a much lower altitude, during what they described as an attempted forced landing near a facility believed to store nuclear weapons.
The theory as reported included several elements: eyewitness accounts of the aircraft burning below low cloud cover (suggesting a lower altitude at breakup than the official record); reports of a second aircraft in the area at the time; claims that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German leader Erich Honecker were flying in the region at the time and that the military establishment was on heightened alert; and a former Czechoslovak military officer who provided what Hornung described as indirect indications supporting the shootdown hypothesis. Hornung himself acknowledged the limits of the evidence, saying there were “only indications, no evidence.”
The theory required explaining what could not be easily explained: the official accident report, which attributed the breakup to an explosion in the baggage compartment based on forensic analysis of the wreckage. Hornung and Theiner acknowledged that an alternative explanation would require that evidence of a bomb had somehow been fabricated or planted — a significant additional claim that they did not establish.