N351AX

Unconfirmed · not established fact

The leg into Iran: one candidate aircraft

No source names the aircraft that flew this leg. Human Rights First describes the Iranians aboard the January flight as boarding "a Kuwaiti charter" at Kuwait City. It does not name an airline or an aircraft, and no other published account does either. What follows is not a finding reported by anyone. It is a match we went looking for in public transponder data, and it should be read that way.

One aircraft fits: 9K-AKQ, an Airbus A320neo operated by Kuwait Airways.

• It left Kuwait International Airport at 12:33 UTC — 1h 23m after N351AX landed at 11:10 UTC.
• Its last position we can trust is 13:43 UTC at 7,650 ft, 2.4 km from Mehrabad International Airport. After that the feed repeats a fixed coordinate, so the landing airport cannot be established from this data.
• It is recorded on the ground away from Kuwait at 14:36 UTC, and climbing again within minutes.
• It was back on the ground at Kuwait International Airport at 15:50 UTC — out and back, with no onward routing.

On the ground at Kuwait

The other half of the case is what happened on the ground. 9K-AKQ landed at Kuwait at 07:40 UTC and its transponder went quiet nine minutes later while it was still taxiing. When it came back on four and a half hours later it was about 1.4 km from where it had gone dark, 148 m from the point where N351AX had stopped, and already rolling. Nine minutes after that it left for Tehran.

That position is not simply the taxiway. Every aircraft that passed this stand during the December search - 108 of them - clusters on a transit route about 120 m from it, and those points sit a median of 227 m away from where 9K-AKQ powered up. It woke up on the apron, off the route everything else uses.

What makes it unusual

An aircraft flying to Tehran is only meaningful if it does not do so routinely. It does not, and neither did its fleet that day:

What this is not

It is not proof. A transponder reports where an aircraft went, never who was aboard, so nothing here shows that any deportee was on this aircraft. Nor were the two aircraft ever transmitting at the same moment: N351AX went quiet an hour before 9K-AKQ came back on, so their closeness is measured across that hour rather than observed, and neither aircraft’s actual parking spot is known because both stop broadcasting while still rolling. The match would be wrong if the flight was an unrelated charter, if a fleetmate outside the sample above also flew to Tehran that afternoon, or if the transfer aircraft was not Kuwait Airways at all. We publish it because the reasoning and the checks are visible and can be argued with, not because the question is closed.