KIEV. Ukraine rejects the conclusions of the Iranian investigation into the shooting down in the skies on the outskirts of Tehran of flight PS752, in which 9 crew members and 167 passengers were killed. Kiev calls the Iranian Civil Aviation Organization’s final report a “cynical attempt” to hide the truth. The Ukraine International Airlines aircraft was hit by two rockets after taking off from Tehran airport on January 8, 2020. According to the Iranians, the cause of the tragedy is only human error by an air defense unit. The tension in those days was skyrocketing. Five days earlier, in fact, at the Baghdad airport by order of the then American President Donald Trump, a drone had killed General Qassam Soleimani, head of the Revolution Guards unit responsible for Iranian foreign policy.
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An operator would have exchanged the Ukrainian plane for an “enemy aircraft” and would have immediately opened fire without warning the central command. Immediately after the report was published, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in a video on Facebook that it was the “non-objective” investigation, that not all evidence has been “included in the evaluation”, and that the conclusions are therefore “misleading and fallacious”.
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According to Kuleba, the document does not take into account all the causes at play, and does not reveal what was at the origin of the tragedy or the circumstances that caused it. “This is not an investigation but a series of manipulations whose purpose is not to establish the truth but to exonerate the Islamic Republic of Iran”.
Ukraine and four other countries (United Kingdom, Canada, Afghanistan and Sweden) whose citizens died in the downing of the flight had asked Tehran to provide detailed explanations on the incident. For the first three days after the incident, the Iranian military had denied any responsibility. The authorities in Tehran had also allowed the site of the crash to be first looted and then for the bulldozers to clear the holes created by the impact of the plane on the ground.
The two rockets
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