Ukrainian plane carrying 176 passengers crashed near Imam Khomeini Airport (AFP)
Kiev:
Ukrainian Foreign Minister said Tuesday that he was soon responsible for human error for shooting down a Ukrainian airliner near Tehran in January, challenging the findings of the Iranian Civil Aviation Organization (CAO) .
CAO said in an interim report that the plane was accidentally shot down, killing 176 people on board, due to radar misalignment and lack of communication between the air defense operator and his commanders.
But Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in an online press briefing that many questions remain unanswered.
“I want to emphasize clearly: it is early to say that the plane was shot down as a result of human error, as claimed by the Iranian side,” he said. “We have many questions, and we need a large number of reliable, impartial, and objective answers to what happened.”
The Iranian Revolutionary Guards downed the Ukrainian International Airlines flight with a surface-to-air missile on January 8 shortly after the Tehran plane took off. Iran then called it a “disastrous mistake” on the part of forces that were on high alert during a confrontation with the United States.
Tehran said last month that it would send the black box flight recorders of the airliner shot down in France for analysis and that experts from the United States, Canada, France, Britain and Ukraine would participate in the decoding.
Kuleba said an Iranian delegation is scheduled to arrive in Kiev later this month to discuss the compensation. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in February that Kiev was not satisfied with the amount of compensation granted by Iran.
(Report by Pavel Polityuk, edited by Timothy Heritage)
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
