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Tehran, Iran | AFP | Iran’s armed forces said Saturday they unintentionally shot down the Ukrainian airliner that crashed this week blaming “human error”.
The plane, which crashed on Wednesday killing all 176 people on board, was mistaken for a “hostile plane” and was hit while enemy threats were at the highest level, according to a press statement published by the official IRNA news agency
The Boeing 737 crashed shortly after Tehran launched missiles at US forces in Iraq in response to the killing of a top Iranian general in a US drone strike in Baghdad.
It is Iran’s worst civil aviation disaster since 1988 when the US military said it shot down an Iran Air plane over the Gulf by mistake, killing all 290 people on board.
The majority of the passengers on Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 were dual national Iranian-Canadians but they also included Ukrainians, Afghans, Britons and Swedes.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday that multiple intelligence sources indicated that an Iranian surface-to-air missile downed the plane after it took off from Tehran.
“We know this may have been unintentional. Canadians have questions, and they deserve answers,” Trudeau told reporters.
