August 06, 2021
An official report by Canadian experts says it has found no evidence that the downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane near Tehran early last year was “premeditated,” but said the incident was the product of “incompetence” by the Iranian government. It accused the Islamic Republic of trying to make scapegoats of low-ranking personnel.
Tehran rejected the charge as “baseless and unacceptable.”
Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) flight PS752 crashed January 8, 2020, while en route to Kyiv, killing all 176 people on board. More than 130 of them had ties to Canada, as dual nationals, legal residents or students. Citizens or residents of Afghanistan, Britain, Iran, Ukraine and Sweden were also killed.
After three days of official denials, Iran admitted that a Pasdar unit had inadvertently shot down the plane when it fired two missiles at what its commander feared was an incoming American cruise missile.
A special Canadian forensic team charged with examining all available evidence about the tragedy said in a June 24 that the blame lay with Iran’s “civilian and military authorities.”
However, the eight-month investigation “found no evidence that Iranian officials ordered the shoot-down or that it was premeditated.”
The probe concluded that an air-defense-unit operator “likely acted on his own in making the decision to launch the missiles,” but it added that the incident would not have occurred if not for the “incompetence, recklessness, and wanton disregard for human life” of Iranian officials.
According to the report, Iranian antiaircraft missiles were on high alert, yet the authorities did not close its airspace or notify airlines in operation at the time.
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohsen Baharvand criticized the report as “highly politicized,” and said that Canada “is not qualified to present reports” on the crash.
Iranian authorities initially denied responsibility and allowed the crash site to be bulldozed. They have also provided no public information about the 10 people they say have been indicted for their role in the incident.
“Iran does not get off the hook in any way whatsoever,” Canadian Foreign Minister Marc Garneau told a news conference.
“It is totally responsible for what happened,” Garneau said, adding that a missile operator made “a series of extremely flawed decisions that could have and should have been avoided.”
He also said that Iran’s military command and control had been too slow both in addressing the failures and taking measures to prevent future tragedy.
Garneau said the Iranian report had “gaping holes” and “places all of the blame on people lower down in the structure,” but he acknowledged that his government’s forensic team was unable to draw conclusions that differed from Iran’s formal “human error” explanation.
However, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was harsher, saying, “Iran’s official account of events is disingenuous, misleading, and superficial, and intentionally ignores key factors.”
He said senior regime officials made the decisions that led to this tragedy, and “the world must not allow them to hide with impunity behind a handful of low-ranking scapegoats.”