DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – Ten officers have been indicted in Iran over the 2020 military shooting of a Ukrainian passenger plane that killed 176 people, a prosecutor said on Tuesday, an announcement made just as Tehran starts indirect negotiations with the West on collapsing nuclear deal with world powers.
The timing of the announcement came after Iran faced harsh international criticism last month for releasing a final report on the shooting of the Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752, which blamed human error, but did not name any person responsible for the incident.
Tehran’s military prosecutor, Gholamabbas Torki, similarly avoided naming those responsible when he announced the charges on Tuesday, when he surrendered his post to Nasser Seraj. The semi-official news agency ISNA and the Iranian judiciary’s Mizan news agency reported their statements.
“The prosecution of the Ukrainian plane case was also issued and a serious and accurate investigation was carried out and the charges were issued to 10 guilty people,” said Mizan, quoting Torki, without giving further details.
After three days of denial in January 2020 in the face of mounting evidence, Iran has finally acknowledged that its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard mistakenly shot down the Ukrainian jet with two surface-to-air missiles. In preliminary reports on last year’s disaster, Iranian officials blamed an air defense operator who, they said, mistook the Boeing 737-800 for an American cruise missile.
The shooting took place on the same day that Iran launched a ballistic missile attack against American troops in Iraq in retaliation for an American drone attack that killed an important Iranian general. While Guard officials publicly apologized for the incident, Iran’s hesitation to elaborate on what happened in the incident shows the power that the force exerts.
Following the release of Iran’s final investigative report, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba criticized the findings as a “cynical attempt to hide the real causes of the crash of our passenger aircraft”. He accused Iran of conducting a “biased” investigation into the disaster that resulted in “misleading” conclusions.
Many flight participants planned to make a connection in Kiev to fly to Canada, 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 “makes no attempt to answer critical questions about what really happened.”
The announcement was made just hours before Iran and the five remaining world powers in their atomic agreement meet in Vienna., where the US is expected to initiate indirect talks with Tehran.
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Associated Press editors Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, and Isabel DeBre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.