Tehran, Iran – Iran recovered some data, adding some of the cockpit talks of the Ukrainian plane shot down by revolutionary guards in January, killing the other 176 people on board, an Iranian official said on Sunday.
This is revealed in a report on that of the Iran Civil Aviation Organization, which describes the official’s statements as a component of the final report that Tehran plans to publish on the massacre of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752.
Progression occurs months after the January 8 accident near Tehran. The Iranian government had first denied responsibility, and only changed course a few days later, after Western countries presented sufficient evidence that Iran had shot down the aircraft.
The shooting took place the same night Iran introduced a ballistic missile attack on U.S. infantrymen in Iraq, its reaction to the U.S. drone strike that killed Guard General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on January 3.
At the time, Iranian troops were preparing for an American counterattack and appear to have the aircraft for a missile. However, Iran did not recognize that, claiming only that after the ballistic missile attack, its air defense was sufficiently alert and had allowed scheduled air traffic to resume in the past, a reference to the Ukrainian aircraft that was allowed to take off from Tehran.
The Ukrainian plane allegedly targeted through two missiles. The aircraft had just taken off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport when the first missile exploded, which probably damaged its radio equipment. The moment the missile probably hit the plane directly, while videos from that night showed the plane exploding in a fireball before crashing into a playground and farmland on the outskirts of Tehran.
For days after the crash, Iranian investigators combed the site, sifting the debris from the plane.
The head of Iran’s civil aviation organization, Captain Touraj Dehghani Zangeneh, said Sunday that the black boxes of the Ukrainian passenger plane only had 19 moments of verbal exchange after the first explosion, the moment the missile hit the plane 25 moments later. The report that quotes it doesn’t give details.
He said the first explosion of a missile sent shrapnel to the plane, probably interrupting the plane’s recorders. He did not reveal any main points of the verbal exchange in the cockpit that was recovered.
Refunds from the United States, Ukraine, France, Canada, Britain and Sweden, countries whose citizens were killed in the turn of fate, provided the process of gathering registration knowledge, Zangeneh said.
In the months following the plane’s downdoing, Iran has fought the largest and deadly coronavirus outbreak in the Middle East. The Iranian is also grappling with crushing U.S. sanctions and wide domestic economic problems.
Last month, an initial report from the Iranian investigation said a poorly aligned missile battery, poor communication between troops and their commanders, and a resolution for chimney clearance led to the plane’s fatal crash.
According to the report, the surface-to-air missile battery targeting the Boeing 737-800 had moved and had not been properly redirected. Missile battery officials failed to control their command center, mistakenly knew civilian escape as a risk and opened fire twice without getting approval from those responsible, he said.
Iran’s Western intelligence officials and analysts shot down the plane with a Russian-made Tor formula known to NATO as SA-15. In 2007, Iran received 29 Tor M1 teams to Russia for an estimated $700 million contract value. The formula is fixed on a tracked vehicle and carries a radar and a package of 8 missiles.
The initial report did not say why the Guard had moved the air defense system, it is believed that this near-airport domain houses both the normal army and paramilitary guard bases.
He also noted that the Ukrainian flight had done nothing ordinary until the missile was launched, its transponder and other knowledge spread. The plane’s black box flight recorder was sent to Paris in June, where foreign researchers tested it.
“Knowledge-recovery activities were carried out with the goal of security and incident prevention,” Zangeneh said, adding an opposed appeal to “any political use of the process.”
He added that Iranian airspace is now “safe and ready” for flights.