During the second round of negotiations, Ukraine will demand that Iran explain what happened on the night when a Boeing 737-800 passenger plane of Ukraine International Airlines was shot down near Tehran and who is responsible for this, Oksana Zolotariova, acting Director of the International Law Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, has said.
“We expect that the next multilateral meeting (between Iran and five countries whose citizens died) will take place before the end of this year, and a bilateral meeting between Ukraine and Iran will take place in mid-October. We have a serious and powerful delegation, which will consist of representatives of the aviation authorities, military, law enforcement agencies, employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Justice with one simple demand, with the question that Iran should explain to us in detail what happened then and who is responsible for it,” Zolotariova said at the online roundtable on Sept 30.
According to her, now there are three separate absolutely parallel tracks regarding the investigation of this crime.
“The first track is a technical investigation carried out by Iran in accordance with Annex 13 of the Chicago Convention. The purpose of this investigation is to establish what exactly caused the plane to crash,” Zolotariova reported.
She said that the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry requires Iran to conduct an unbiased technical investigation and describe in it what really happened that night in the skies over Tehran and submit its proposals to the council of the International Civil Aviation Organization (IKAO).
According to Zolotariova, the second track is a criminal investigation. Iran also has primary jurisdiction in such an investigation, but given that the citizens of Ukraine were killed and the plane was Ukrainian, Ukraine has opened its own criminal proceedings and is under investigation, she said.
“It is clear that Ukrainian law enforcement agencies are now facing an extremely difficult task. They do not have access to the scene of the event, they do not have the opportunity to interrogate witnesses to the extent that they would like to actually establish from a criminal point of view all persons involved in this knocking down,” she said.
As reported, the UIA Boeing 737-800 passenger plane, which was supposed to perform flight PS752 on the Tehran-Kyiv route, was shot down near the Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran immediately after takeoff early in the morning on Jan. 8. There were 167 passengers and nine crew members on board. They all died. Among the dead – eleven citizens of Ukraine (including nine crew members), 82 citizens of Iran, 63 – Canada, 10 – Sweden, four – Afghanistan, three – Germany, and the UK. On Jan. 11 Iranian authorities admitted that Boeing was shot down by mistake by the Iranian military.
Later, the Commander of the Aerospace Forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Amir Ali Hajizadeh said that he was taking full responsibility for the crash of the Ukrainian plane.
