DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – Ten officials have been charged in Iran over the 2020 military shooting incident of a Ukrainian passenger plane that killed 176 people, a prosecutor said on Tuesday. An announcement comes just as Tehran began indirect negotiations with the West over nuclear deal with world powers.
The timing of the announcement follows after Iran received international criticism last month over the fact that it released a final report on the dismantling of flight no. PS752 of the Ukrainian International Airways, which blames human errors, but does not name anyone responsible for the incident.
Tehran military prosecutor Gholamabbas Torki also avoided naming those responsible when he announced the charges on Tuesday while handing over his office to Nasser Seraj. The semi-official ISNA news agency and the Iranian judiciary’s Mizan news agency both reported his comments.
“The accusation of the case of the Ukrainian plane was also issued and a serious and accurate investigation was carried out and accusations were issued for 10 people who were guilty,” Mizan Torki quoted without elaborating.
After three days of denial in January 2020 in the face of growing evidence, Iran has finally acknowledged that its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard wrongly shot down the Ukrainian plane with two surface missiles. In preliminary reports of the disaster last year, Iranian authorities blamed an air defense operator who mistaken the Boeing 737-800 as a US cruise missile.
The shooting took place on the same day as Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on US troops in Iraq in retaliation for a US drone that killed an Iranian top general. While guard officials have publicly apologized for the incident, Iran’s reluctance to elaborate on what happened in the incident shows the power it is using.
Following the release of Iran’s final investigation report, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba expressed the findings with a “cynical attempt to hide the real causes of the crash of our passenger planes. He accused Iran of conducting a “biased” investigation into the disaster that led to “misleading” conclusions.
Many on the flight planned to commit in Kiev to fly to Canada, which is a large Iranian population. Canada’s foreign and transport ministers have similarly criticized the report, saying it ‘has no hard facts or evidence’ and ‘makes no effort to answer critical questions about what really happened’.
The announcement comes hours before Iran and the five world powers remaining in its nuclear deal meet in Vienna., where the US should start indirect talks with Tehran.
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Associated Press authors Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran and Isabel DeBre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.