DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – Ten officials have been charged in Iran over the 2020 military shooting of a Ukrainian airliner that killed 176 people, a prosecutor said Tuesday, just as Tehran begins indirect negotiations with the West on his collapsed nuclear deal with world powers.
The timing of the announcement comes after Iran faced devastating international criticism last month for releasing a final report on the shooting down of Ukraine International Airlines flight number PS752, which blamed human error but identified no one responsible for the incident. .
Tehran’s military prosecutor Gholamabbas Torki similarly avoided naming those responsible when he announced the charges on Tuesday while turning his office over to Nasser Seraj. The semi-official ISNA news agency and the Iranian judiciary’s Mizan news agency both reported his comments.
“The charge against the case of the Ukrainian plane was also issued and a serious and close investigation was conducted and charges were issued against 10 people who were to blame,” Mizan Torki quoted without elaborating.
After three days of denial in January 2020 despite mounting evidence, Iran finally acknowledged that its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard had accidentally shot down the Ukrainian jet with two surface-to-air missiles. In preliminary reports on last year’s disaster, Iranian authorities blamed an air defense operator they believed the Boeing 737-800 to be a US cruise missile.
The shooting took place on the same day that Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on US forces in Iraq in retaliation for a US drone strike that killed an Iranian top general. While guards publicly apologized for the incident, Iran’s reluctance to elaborate on what happened during the incident shows the power wielded by the force.
After publishing Iran’s final investigative report, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba denounced the findings as a “cynical attempt to hide the true causes of the downing of our passenger plane.” He accused Iran of conducting a “biased” investigation into the disaster that resulted in “misleading” conclusions.
Many fleeing planned to join Kiev in order to fly to Canada, which is home to a large Iranian population. Canadian Foreign and Transport Ministers similarly criticized the report, saying it “has no hard facts or evidence” and “makes no attempt to answer critical questions about what really happened.”
The announcement came just hours before Iran and the five world powers remaining in the nuclear deal meet in Vienna, where the US will start indirect talks with Tehran.
Associated Press writers, Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, and Isabel DeBre in Dubai, UAE, contributed to this report.