KYIV (UKRAINE) – Ukraine’s foreign minister said on Tuesday that it was too soon to blame human error for the shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger airliner near Tehran in January, which would be a challenge the findings of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation (CAO).
The CAO said in an interim report that the plane was accidentally downed, killing 176 people on board. The reason for the accident was because of a misalignment of a radar system and lack of communication between the air defence operator and his commanders.
However, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told an online briefing that many questions remained unanswered.
“I want to clearly emphasise: it is early to say that the plane was shot down as a result of human error, as the Iranian side claims. We have many questions, and we need a large number of authoritative, unbiased, objective answers about what happened.”
The Ukraine International Airlines flight was shot down by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards with a ground-to-air missile on January 8 shortly after the plane took off from Tehran. Iran later declared it a “disastrous mistake” by forces on high alert during a confrontation with the United States.
Tehran said last month said the black box flight recorders from the downed airliner would be sent to France for analysis. Experts from the United States, Canada, France, Britain and Ukraine would be taking part in the decoding.
Kuleba said an Iranian delegation was likely to arrive in Kiev later this month to talk about compensation. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in February Kiev was not satisfied with the compensation’s size Iran had offered.
(Photos syndicated via Reuters)
This story has been edited by BH staff and is published from a syndicated field.