DUBAI, UAE (AP) – Ten officials have been indicted in Iran for the military shooting of a 2020 Ukrainian passenger plane that killed 176 people, a prosecutor said on Tuesday, an announcement that came just as Tehran initiates indirect negotiations with the West nuclear collapse with world powers.
The timing of the announcement comes after Iran faced international criticism that disappeared last month for publishing a final report on the shooting of Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 which was blamed for human error but did not name anyone responsible for the incident.
Similarly, Tehran’s military prosecutor, Gholamabbas Torki, avoided appointing 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 justice news agency Mizan reported their statements.
“The indictment of the Ukrainian plane case was also issued and a serious and precise investigation was carried out and charges were issued for ten people who were guilty,” Mizan said, without detailing, in Torki.
After three days of denial in January 2020 in the face of growing evidence, Iran finally acknowledged that its revolutionary paramilitary guard had mistakenly shot down the Ukrainian airliner with two surface-to-air missiles. In preliminary reports of last year’s disaster, Iranian authorities blamed an air defense operator who said it confused the Boeing 737-800 with an American cruise missile.
The shooting came on the same day that Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on U.S. troops in Iraq in retaliation for an American drone attack that killed an Iranian general. While Guard officials publicly apologized for the incident, Iran’s hesitation in explaining what happened in the incident shows the power the force wields.
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 planes.” of passengers “. He accused Iran of conducting a “biased” investigation into the disaster which resulted in “misleading” conclusions.
Many of the flight had planned to connect to Kiev to fly to Canada, where a large Iranian population lives. Canada’s foreign and transport ministers similarly criticized the report, saying it “has no difficult facts or evidence” and “does not attempt to answer critical questions about what really happened.”
The announcement came just hours before Iran and the five remaining world powers in its atomic deal met in Vienna., where the US will begin indirect talks with Tehran.
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Associated Press writers Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, and Isabel DeBre in Dubai, UAE, contributed to this report.