President Donald Trump has confirmed that he secretly swapped planes as he left a Nato summit in Turkey last month due to a possible threat.
“I go by Secret Service and the military. They wanted me to go in a different flight, different plane,” Trump told reporters. “I just have to do what they say.”
The revelation comes after reports that Trump boarded Air Force One on 8 July in view of television cameras, before hiding in a catering truck to be transported to a military aircraft.
The last-minute switch has raised questions about whether those left on the decoy plane were in danger, but Trump said on Tuesday the jet he boarded instead could have been at “greater risk… because that would be the plane, I think, that they would be more likely to go for.”
Officials told the BBC’s US partner CBS News that the US had detected a credible Iranian threat to fire a missile at the plane. The New York Times reported that US intelligence had information of a person near the Nato summit who had been seen with a shoulder-fired missile.
Journalists and some White House staff on board did not know the US president had been smuggled out as part of an elaborate ruse in response to a possible Iranian threat.
Trump has previously said he was Iran’s “number one target” during the summit in Ankara.
“I guess there was a threat out there,” the president said during a visit aboard Air Force One to an event in Ohio on Tuesday. “I didn’t really ask too much about it. I get a lot of threats.”
He added: “I have a lot of threats that you don’t know about.”
The clandestine manoeuvre last month came a day after the US renewed military strikes on Iran following a breakdown of negotiations between Washington and Tehran to end the war.
Trump had arrived in Turkey aboard a newer Boeing 747-8 donated by Qatar, but announced that he would leave on the old Air Force One “for old time’s sake”.
Source:Fiilafmonline/BBC
