A videotape purporting to show insurgents shooting down the Hercules transport plane that crashed yesterday in Iraq killing ten British servicemen, has been shown on the Arab television station al-Jazeera.

A spokesman for al-Jazeera said it received the video from a group calling itself "the Green Brigade, which is one of the brigades of the 1920 Revolution Brigade, a military wing of the National Islamic Resistance in Iraq".

The videotape shows footage of a finger pressing a button and then two missiles or rockets flying up into the air. The video does not show any impact with a plane. Instead, it cuts to footage of people walking through a plane's wreckage burning on the ground.

It is not immediately possible to determine if the wreckage shown in the video is that of the British C-130 Hercules that crashed 25 miles north of Baghdad on Sunday. The footage shows burning wreckage scattered over a wide area. British officials have said the wreckage of the RAF plane was widely scattered by the crash.

Another group, Ansar al-Islam, which has links to al-Qaeda, had already issued a claim on a web site that it was responsible for the plane's loss. That group provided no evidence of the claim.

An insurgent group called the 1920 Revolution Brigade of the National Islamic Resistance in Iraq first emerged in Iraq's Sunni Triangle in July of 2003 but a Green Brigade of that group has not been heard of before.

Nine RAF servicemen and a soldier were on board the Hercules which crashed 20-miles north-west of Baghdad in the highest single loss of British lives since the invasion of Iraq two years ago.

A military investigation has been launched in an attempt to discover why the plane crashed after leaving Baghdad International Airport en route for the Balad airbase at 14.55pm GMT yesterday.

In a statement released this morning Mr Hoon said: "It is with great regret that I can confirm that nine Royal Air Force personnel and one soldier are missing believed killed in yesterday's crash of an RAF C-130 Hercules in Iraq. On behalf of the Ministry of Defence and all the Armed Forces, I should like to extend my deepest sympathies to the families of these servicemen."

Mr Hoon added: "UK and US forces have secured the crash site, and are now recovering the bodies and attempting to ascertain the cause of the crash. We are aware of reports that the aircraft may have been shot down, but we are not in a position to come to any conclusions until the investigation is complete.

"The deaths of these servicemen are especially poignant on a day when Iraqis were able to enjoy the freedom of democratic elections for the first time in many years. I can only echo the sentiment of the Prime Minister in recognising the sacrifice of these servicemen."

Ansar al-Islam said in a statement on an Islamic website that its fighters tracked the aircraft, "which was flying at a low altitude, and fired an anti-tank missile at it".

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