DUBAI, UAE – Ten officials indicted in Iran following the 2020 military shooting of a Ukrainian passenger plane that killed 176 people, a prosecutor said on Tuesday, with an announcement coming just as Tehran begins indirect negotiations with the West collapsed nuclear deal with world powers.
The moment of the announcement comes after Iran faced offended international criticism last month for launching a final report on the shooting of flight no. PS752 of Ukraine International Airlines which blamed the human error, but did not hold anyone responsible for the incident.
Tehran’s military prosecutor Gholamabbas Torki similarly avoided calling those responsible when he announced the allegations on Tuesday, while handing over his office to Nasser Seraj. His semi-official ISNA news agency and Iran’s Mizan news agency reported his remarks.
“The indictment of the Ukrainian plane case was also issued and a serious and precise investigation was carried out and indictments were issued for 10 people who were found guilty,” Mizan said, without elaborating, Torki.
After three days of denial, in January 2020, in the face of growing evidence, Iran has finally acknowledged that the Revolutionary Paramilitary Guard erroneously shot down the Ukrainian plane with two surface-to-air missiles. In preliminary reports of the disaster last year, Iranian authorities blamed an air defense operator they said had mistaken a Boeing 737-800 for a US cruise missile.
The shooting took place on the same day that Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on US troops in Iraq, in retaliation for an American drone attack that killed a top Iranian general. While Guards officials have publicly apologized for the incident, Iran’s reluctance to further explain what happened in the incident shows the strength of the force.
Following the release of Iran’s final investigation report, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba criticized the findings as a “cynical attempt to hide the real causes of the downing of our passenger planes.” He accused Iran of conducting a “biased” investigation into the disaster, which led to “misleading” conclusions.
Many of the flight planned to connect to Kiev to fly to Canada, which is home to a large Iranian population. Canada’s foreign and transport ministers similarly criticized the report, saying it “has no hard facts or evidence” and “is not trying to answer critical questions about what really happened.”
The announcement came hours before Iran and the five remaining world powers in its nuclear deal met in Vienna., where the US is to begin indirect talks with Tehran.
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Associated Press writers Nasser Karimi of Tehran, Iran and Isabel DeBre of Dubai, UAE, contributed to the report.