Forty days after the downing of Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752, Iranian families of the crash’s victims organized a commemoration ceremony in front of Iran’s embassy in Kyiv on Feb. 17.
“The Iranian regime won’t let us grieve in peace,” organizer Mohammed, who asked not to disclose his surname out of fear of retribution from the theocratic regime in Tehran, told the Kyiv Post by email. “We had to do it in Ukraine and watch it on our computers.”
Mohammed lost his young cousin in the crash on Jan. 8, which killed a total of 176 people.
The data on the nationality of the victims varies due to the fact some passengers held dual citizenship. According to Ukrainian officials, victims included 82 Iranians, 63 Canadians, 11 Ukrainians, 10 Swedes, four Afghans, three Germans, and three Britons. Of the 167 passengers, 138 were traveling to Canada via Kyiv. Many were Iranian Canadians.
Iran later admitted to shooting down the plane.
Iranian officials have suppressed protests that erupted in the aftermath of the crash and intervened in the funerals of the plane crash victims in an attempt to prevent them from turning into anti-regime demonstrations, according to media reports.
Mohammed said members of the Revolutionary Guard visited some of the families and told them not to talk to the media and to “grieve at home, not in public.”
“To be honest, the thing that we are the most afraid of is them arresting us or even worse,” he wrote.
Around 15 families were involved in putting together a memorial ceremony in Kyiv, and over 300 Iranian citizens contributed money to the cause, Mohammed said. He reached out to a little-known Ukrainian public organization, which, as the Kyiv Post was told by organizer Yevheniy Adamenko, arranges protests and demonstrations.
A few dozen people gathered outside of the Iranian embassy in Kyiv early on Feb. 17, holding placards with names of the victims and red roses. After a minute of silence, they lit lamps and lay flowers at the site.
The Kyiv Post requested a comment from the Iranian embassy in Kyiv, but has not received a response.
At a separate event, a memorial monument to the victims was unveiled at Kyiv’s Boryspil airport.
Fallout
After the crash on Jan. 8, it took Iran three days to admit to “unintentionally” shooting down the Ukrainian passenger plane. The downing occurred hours after Iran fired multiple missiles at two airbases used by U.S. forces in Iraq, retaliation for the assassination of a top Iranian military commander by U.S. drone strike on Jan. 3.
Following Tehran’s admission, mass anti-regime protests erupted in several Iranian cities condemning government officials for lying.
Iranian authorities violently quelled their critics. They reportedly arrested the person who filmed the Ukrainian plane’s downing outside of Tehran’s airport. Security forces beat and arrested the protesters with batons and fired tear gas and rubber bullets at them. They even briefly arrested the British ambassador to Iran, who attended an “illegal gathering.” It had been advertised as a vigil for crash victims, he tweeted.
Canada and other nations that lost their citizens have pushed Iran for more cooperation on the investigation into the crash, the Associated Press reported on Feb. 15. Previously, Iran refused to send the black boxes of the downed plane to Ukraine.
While Ukraine and Canada held official memorial services attended by their state leaders and offered compensation to the families of their citizens killed in the crash, Iran treated mourning relatives the opposite way.
“They are avoiding everything and not giving any support to the families,” Mohammed wrote to the Kyiv Post. “The natural thing was to let the families organize at least a commemorative event, and even that they would not let us do. They don’t want us to speak.”
According to him, some of the victims were buried under regime surveillance, and the families could not honor the memory of their deceased loved ones as they wanted.
The Iranian government promised the families compensation, but none have received payment so far, Mohammed said.
“Even if we get some money, we don’t even know if we would accept it. It will be dirty money that the criminals that killed our families and friends gave us. We will probably use it to install a memorial for all the lost ones so that no one forgets what happened and who is responsible.”
The victims’ families have reportedly faced harassment and pressure from Iranian officials, Radio Farda, the Iranian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, wrote.
