UN rapporteur accuses Iran of concealing circumstances of Ukrainian plane crash

Iran is deliberately concealing the circumstances behind the downing of a Ukrainian passenger jet in early 2020, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Agnes Callamard has said.

She said this in Geneva on February 23, Germany's international broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported.

According to Callamard, the inconsistencies in the official explanations by the Iranian authorities seem designed "to create a maximum of confusion and a minimum of clarity."

Callamard released a 45-page letter with questions, which she sent to Tehran in December last year. She noted that she had not yet received a response from the Iranian government.

Callamard said that according to Iran, one of the reasons behind the downing of the Ukrainian plane was a broken radar system that created communication problems with a military unit.

She also accused the Iranian authorities of allowing looters to the site of the disaster, and later it used bulldozers to clear away debris at the crash site, not allowing the relatives to receive the belongings of the victims.

As was reported earlier, on January 8, 2020, Ukraine International Airlines plane (flight PS752) heading from Tehran to Kyiv crashed shortly after taking off from the Imam Khomeini International Airport. There were 176 people on board – nine crew members (all Ukrainians) and 167 passengers (citizens of Ukraine, Iran, Canada, Sweden, Afghanistan, Germany, and the UK).

On January 11, 2020, Iran admitted that its military had accidentally shot down the Ukrainian passenger jet. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) accepted full responsibility for the downing of the Ukrainian airliner. On December 30, 2020, the Iranian state news agency IRNA reported that the Iranian government would pay $150,000 to the families of each of the 176 victims of the plane crash.

Photo: AA