defense battery likely fired the interceptor missile involved in
a pre-dawn explosion that injured dozens of civilians and tore
through homes in U.S.-ally Bahrain 10 days into the war on Iran,
according to an analysis by academic researchers examined by
Reuters.
Both Bahrain and Washington have blamed an Iranian drone attack
for the March 9 blast, which the Gulf kingdom said injured 32
people including children, some seriously. Commenting on the day
of the attack, U.S. Central Command said on X that an Iranian
drone struck a residential neighborhood in Bahrain.
In response to questions from Reuters, Bahrain on Saturday
acknowledged for the first time that a Patriot missile was
involved in the explosion over the Mahazza neighborhood on Sitra
island, offshore from the capital Manama and also home to an oil
refinery.
In a statement, a Bahraini government spokesperson said the
missile successfully intercepted an Iranian drone mid-air,
saving lives.
“The damage and injuries sustained were not a result of a direct
impact to the ground of either the Patriot interceptor or the
Iranian drone,” the spokesperson said.
Neither Bahrain or Washington has provided evidence that an
Iranian drone was involved in the Mahazza incident.
The use of costly, advanced weaponry to defend against attacks
by far cheaper drones has been a defining feature of the war.
The incident points to the risks and limitations of this
strategy: The blast from the powerful Patriot, whether or not it
intercepted a drone, contributed to widespread damage and
casualties, while Bahrain’s air defenses were unable to prevent
strikes that night on the nearby oil refinery, which declared
force majeure hours later.
When asked for comment, the Pentagon referred Reuters to Central
Command, which did not immediately reply to questions.
In response to questions sent to the White House, a senior U.S.
official said the United States was “crushing” Iran’s ability to
shoot or produce drones and missiles. “We will continue to
address these threats to our country and our allies,” the
official said, adding that the U.S. military “never targets
civilians.” The official did not answer specific questions about
the Patriot attack.
On February 28, the first day of U.S. strikes on Iran, an
Iranian girls school took a direct hit. Investigators at the
U.S. Defense Department believe U.S. forces were likely
responsible, Reuters first reported, possibly because of
outdated targeting data, two U.S. sources previously told the
news agency.
Video of the aftermath of the Mahazza blast in Bahrain verified
by Reuters shows rubble around houses, a thick layer of dust in
the streets, an injured man and screaming residents.
Both Bahrain and the United States operate U.S. Patriot air
defense batteries in the kingdom, a close U.S. ally located on
the Persian Gulf that hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet along
with the regional U.S. naval command.
On the night of the explosion in Mahazza, the refinery on Sitra
came under Iranian attack, according to Bahraini national oil
company Bapco. Videos show smoke rising from the facility on the
morning of March 9.
Reuters could not establish whether the cause of the explosion
during a night of Iranian attacks on Sitra would have been
immediately apparent to U.S. and Bahraini forces. Bahrain in its
statement did not say why it had not mentioned the involvement
of a Patriot at the time. Iran’s mission to the United Nations
did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the
incident.
Produced by Raytheon, part of RTX Corp., the Patriot is
the U.S. Army’s primary high-to-medium-range
aircraft-and-missile interceptor system and forms the backbone
of U.S. and allied air defenses. Raytheon didn’t respond to a
request for comment about the incident.
Bahrain’s government declined to say whether the missile that
detonated on March 9, was fired by its own forces or by the
United States.
But research associates Sam Lair and Michael Duitsman and
Professor Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of
International Studies at Monterey concluded with
moderate-to-high confidence that the suspect missile was likely
launched from a U.S. Patriot battery located about 4 miles (7
km) to the southwest of the Mahazza neighborhood.
The conclusions of the three American munitions and open-source
intelligence researchers, reported here for the first time, were
based on their review of open-source visuals and commercial
satellite imagery.
Reuters showed the Middlebury analysis to two target-analysis
experts and one Patriot system missile researcher, who found no
reason to dispute its conclusion.
One of them, Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting advisor and
policy analyst at the Pentagon, said Lair, Duitsman and Lewis’s
conclusions were “pretty undeniable.”
A small Gulf state, Bahrain plays a critical role in the
security of the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint that carries
about a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas and
has been almost entirely closed by Iran, causing unprecedented
disruption to world oil supplies.
Key to the Middlebury analysis was a video shot from an
apartment building and shared on social media. The video shows
the suspect Patriot roaring across the night sky at low altitude
on a northeastern trajectory. It then angled downward and out of
sight. A flash of light in the distance appeared to mark its
detonation 1.3 seconds later.
Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at
Berkeley specializing in digital forensics, reviewed the video
for Reuters to determine if it was generated by artificial
intelligence. He found “no obvious evidence that the video is
fake.”
Lair, Duitsman and Lewis geolocated the video to a neighborhood
in Riffa, Bahrain’s second-largest city. Reuters confirmed the
geolocation. The earliest post of the video Reuters could find
online was at around 2 am local time on March 9.
“The Riffa site’s location and orientation are consistent with
the trajectory” of that of the suspect Patriot, the analysis
said.
Multiple videos posted to social media the morning of March 9
show damage to residences in Block 602 of the Mahazza
neighborhood. The researchers first geolocated the visuals using
landmarks that appeared to match commercial satellite imagery of
the area and visible street addresses. Reuters independently
verified the geolocation.
The researchers then traced the trajectory of the suspect
missile from Block 602 straight back to what they assessed –
based on commercial satellite imagery – was the U.S. Patriot
battery based less than half a mile from where the video of the
missile in flight was recorded in Riffa.
A battery consists of a radar unit, a command hub and up to
eight launchers that are integrated to detect, track and
intercept aircraft and missiles.
Using commercial satellite imagery, the researchers determined
that five launchers were visible at the Riffa site two days
before the March 9 incident.
The battery has been there since at least 2009, according to
satellite imagery. The Bahraini Defense Force did not start
operating its own Patriot systems until 2024, according to a
Lockheed Martin press release.
The Riffa site has features that are both distinctive to U.S.
Patriot batteries in the region and different from those of
known Bahrain-operated batteries, the researchers said,
including protective walls, unpaved roads and a lack of
permanent buildings. Based on these elements, the researchers
concluded that the battery is likely operated by the United
States, which uses Patriots to defend its naval sites in
Bahrain.
The researchers were unable to say with confidence what caused
the Patriot to explode. But they added that based on the
available evidence, including the pattern and spread of damage
on the ground, it appeared to have detonated mid-flight.
They concluded that it was possible the Patriot was aimed at a
low-flying drone and that the combined explosion of the missile
and drone ignited the blast, the analysis said.
“If this was the case, this was an irresponsible intercept
attempt as it endangered the lives and the homes of allied
civilians in a residential area,” the analysis said
This scenario matches what Bahrain’s government spokesperson
said happened: that the Patriot intercepted an Iranian drone and
both detonated in the air.
However, the analysis said, the direction of the damage and the
lack of available evidence of a drone over the neighborhood
suggested another scenario, that “the explosion was the result
of the detonation of the warhead and unexpended propellant of a
Patriot interceptor.”
Despite the claim by Bahrain, the researchers said it was less
likely the missile made contact with a drone. Reuters could not
independently verify the presence or not of an Iranian drone
during the incident.
The analysis said that videos taken after the attack and
photographs released by Bahrani authorities show that the blast
damage was concentrated along four streets of Mahazza.
A Bahrain television news broadcast on March 9 and a government
press release showed an extensively damaged home about 400 feet
(120 meters) from the center of the main blast area, with
interior photos showing holes in a wall created by shrapnel, the
analysis said.
Robert Maher, an audio specialist who reviewed the video at the
request of Reuters, said his analysis supports the approximate
location of the explosion over the damaged homes.
In the video, a flash is seen about eight seconds in, but an
explosion is never heard before the clip ends 19 seconds later.
That’s because light travels faster than sound. Based on how
long the sound would take to reach the person who shot the
video, the explosion had to be more than four miles away. The
damaged homes were about 4.6 miles (7.4 km) away, which fits
with the timing.
When all the damage is considered together, the Middlebury
analysis noted, it matches what one would expect if a Patriot
missile exploded in the air over a road intersection in the
neighborhood. Pieces of the missile then flew about 120 meters
farther and hit another house, the analysis said.
Maher said that in the audio from the video he heard no drones
or other missiles, although their sounds would have been faint
or inaudible if they were more than four miles away from where
the video was taken.
“I don’t see anything that is inconsistent with my observations
from the audio,” Maher said after reviewing the Middlebury
analysis.
Defense and industry officials say Patriot misfires are rare,
but they do happen, including an errant missile in 2007 that hit
a farm in Qatar.
In an X post on March 9, U.S. Central Command denounced Iranian
and Russian news reports that said the incident in Mahazza was
the result of a failed Patriot, calling it a “LIE.” It said an
Iranian drone struck a residential neighborhood.
Reuters and the Middlebury researchers were unable to obtain or
review any visual evidence of missile or drone fragments.
Reuters attempted to contact witnesses in Bahrain, but several
people declined to speak, citing fear of reprisals. Human Rights
Watch has documented arrests of people in Bahrain during the war
for posting videos on social media of attacks.
In the video of the suspect missile in flight, the Patriot
appears to pass a much steeper smoke trail that the researchers
said likely belonged to a first interceptor fired moments
earlier.
Patriots are often fired in pairs to increase the chances that
one hits the target. Neither the researchers or Reuters could
establish what happened to the first missile.
The low trajectory of the second missile and its deviation from
the route of the earlier launch could be signs of a possible
problem, the researchers said. But they could not rule out the
possibility that it was shot in that direction on purpose.
Bahrain’s spokesperson said any suggestion of malfunction or
misfiring of the Patriots in Bahrain “was factually incorrect.”
Published on March 22, 2026