Dubai: Iran confirmed in a report released on Tuesday that two Russian-made anti-aircraft missiles hit a Ukrainian airliner that was shot down on January 8, killing all 176 aboard.
While Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had previously admitted it shot down the plane, the report marked the first official acknowledgment that two missiles struck the aircraft, matching amateur videos that surfaced after the Boeing 737-800 went down.
The report by Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation did not immediately say the missiles caused the crash but only that “the impact of these missiles on the accident and the analysis of this action are under investigation.”
The report also requested help from US and French authorities for equipment and know-how to recover information from Flight 752’s flight recorders, the so-called “black boxes” that record the voices in the cockpit and the flight data.
Iran faces growing impatience by countries whose citizens were on the plane, particularly Canada and Ukraine, for access to the recorders. Iranian officials first said they would send them to Ukraine for analysis but then backtracked.
Read the article by Paul Schemm in The Sydney Morning Herald (from The Washington Post).