March 26, 2021
The Islamic Republic has issued its final report on the shootdown of a Ukrainian passenger plane 15 months ago and Canada (which had the most nationals on board) and Ukraine tore into the report.
Ukraine largely lashed the report as little more than a work of propaganda, while Canadians mostly tore into it as unprofessional and incomplete.
Kathy Fox, chair of Canada’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB), said she plans to pursue discussions at the UN aviation agency “in the coming weeks and months” to assure an independent probe in cases where state militaries are involved in bringing down airliners. Under the current rules, the country where a crash occurs is in charge of all investigations.
In its final report issued March 17, the Iranian Civil Aviation Organization blamed misalignment of a missile launcher’s radar and an error by a Pasdar air defense operator for the downing of the aircraft January 8, 2020. That is the same thing it said in an earlier interim report.
While the Canadian TSB called the scenario a “plausible explanation for what happened,” the independent agency said the report lacked evidence. Ukraine went further and called the report a cynical attempt to cover up the true reasons for the crash.
Iran has put most of the blame on one fact the air defense missile battery that shot down the plane had recently been moved. And, after that move, no one re-aligned the radar system. As a result, when the Ukrainian plane left Imam Khomeini International Airport and headed westward, the battery commander looked at his radar screen and saw a flying object coming from the southwest, headed straight for downtown Tehran.
He never considered the plane was coming from the airport because the miscalibrated radar indicated the plane was coming from another direction.
That didn’t satisfy most foreigners reading the report. They said the report failed to explain why Iran had not closed its airspace that night after it fired missiles at a US base in Iraq and went on high alert awaiting a US response. They also said the report failed to explain why the missile battery had not shot down other planes that had left the airport that night before the Ukrainian aircraft.
The report, in both Farsi and English, runs to 285 pages. Only two paragraphs were devoted to “Accident Causes and Contributing Factors.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba issued a statement saying, “Ukraine earlier sent Iran more than 90 pages of remarks and proposals to its draft final report and insisted on Iran including it in that document.
“However, what we saw published today is just a cynical attempt to hide the true causes…. This is not a report; it is a collection of manipulations, the goal of which is not to establish the truth, but to whitewash the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he said.
Canada’s foreign minister and transport minister issued a joint statement saying, “The report makes no attempt to answer critical questions about what truly happened. It appears incomplete and has no hard facts or evidence.”
A total of 176 persons died aboard the downed jet.
