Iran Sentences 10 Airmen To Prison Over Downed Ukraine Airliner
Date
4/16/2023 8:02:44 PM
(MENAFN- Trend News Agency) Iran's judiciary sentenced 10 members of its air defense forces
to between one and 13 years in prison for their involvement in
shooting down a Ukrainian passenger plane near Tehran in 2020,
state media said, trend reports citing bloomberg .
In a statement published on Sunday, Mizan Online, the official
news portal for Iran's judiciary, didn't name any of the
individuals and said the verdicts had been reached after 20 court
hearings and“detailed investigations” over three years.
The main defendant in the trial, described as“the commander of
the Tor M-1 defense system,” was sentenced to three years in prison
for the involuntary manslaughter of the 176 passengers and crew
aboard Ukrainian International Airlines Flight PS752. He was handed
a further 10 years for ignoring protocol and the“scale of the
consequences of his actions.”
Ukraine and Canada Slam Iranian Report Into 2020 Plane
Disaster
The Boeing 737-800 plane was shot down by a unit of Iran's
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps minutes after taking off from
Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport on the morning of Jan.
8, 2020.
The disaster sparked outrage and protests in Iran at the time
and continues to fuel dissent, most notably during the recent
protests against the Islamic Republic's religious establishment and
government.
Officials initially claimed the Ukrainian jet crashed because of
technical problems before admitting days later that an IRGC missile
operative had fired two missiles at the jet because he allegedly
mistook it for a cruise missile.
The incident happened within hours of Iran carrying out a
“revenge operation” against the US for its assassination of a top
Iranian general a week earlier, sparking concerns of an outright
conflict between the two countries.
The indictment lists a number of failures by the main defendant
that it attributes to“ignorance and a mistaken belief that the
target was hostile.” The failures include basic errors in
navigation and communication, including a lack of any effort to
consult the command post to establish the identity of the
target.
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