NEW YORK – Arad Zarei was 17 years old. He was born in Twickenham, a south-west area of London famous for its rugby stadium, to soon separated Iranian parents. He had followed his father to Canada, as he had taken Canadian nationality, and to his fellow students at Green Secondary School in Richmond Hill, Ontario, he was “the kindest boy in the whole school.” On 8 January 2020 he happily boarded the Boeing 737-800 which from Iran – where he had spent the holidays in Shiraz with his mother – would bring him home with a stopover in Ukraine. He was one of the 167 passengers who (along with 9 crew members) would have died within tens of minutes, victims of Iran’s revenge of the ayatollahs.
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Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 Tehran-Kiev was destroyed a few minutes after take-off, shot down by an Iranian Revolutionary Guard “Tor” surface-to-air missile, perhaps in the belief that the plane was a US Air Force fighter. The Iranian regime first tried to blame the pilots, then spoke of a mechanical accident, only on January 11 – two days after US intelligence images and data proved to the world that the plane had been shot down by the missile ” Tor ”- admitted what the then president Hassan Rouhani called a“ disastrous mistake ”. That it was revenge rather than error was discovered during the difficult investigations, boycotted in every way by the ayatollahs: revenge to punish the United States which, a few days earlier, had killed the leader of the Revolutionary Guards Qasem Soleimani with a drone.
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Of the 176 dead, 85 were Canadian citizens, another 53 were headed to Canada via Kiev. The families of some of the victims decided to sue the Tehran government and yesterday the first sentence arrived: Iran will have to pay 107 million dollars in “punitive damages”, “compensatory damages” plus interest to the families of six people with Canadian citizenship or residence. Last year, the Ontario Superior Court ruled that the shooting down of the passenger plane by the Revolutionary Guards was an “act of terrorism,” thus allowing families to circumvent Iran’s legal immunity (foreign nations are normally immune from lawsuits in Canadian courts) and seek compensation.
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It is still unclear whether and how families can actually collect the millions in damages owed by Iran, even though the Tehran regime had previously offered $ 150,000 for each victim and there is theoretically the possibility of seizing oil tankers and other assets. Iranians abroad. The sentence, which the lawyers of the families involved have defined as “historic”, has in any case a great symbolic and political value in today’s delicate relations between Iran and the West.
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According to the Ontario judge, the ayatollahs regime is “civilly responsible because the missile attacks were intentional and the shooting down of civilian aircraft constitutes, under federal law, a terrorist activity”. Leading the family group’s requests to the court was Mehrzad Zarei, Arad’s father, the only one (along with another Canadian who lost his wife and daughter) not to request anonymity: “I owed it to my son” .
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