The circumstances of the crash of the Ukrainian International Airlines Boeing 737 connecting Tehran to Kiev were clarified on Saturday, July 11, by the Iranian Civil Aviation. On the night of January 8, Iran's air defenses were on high alert for fear of an American attack. The Islamic Republic had just attacked a base used by the American army in Iraq in response to the elimination, in an American strike in Baghdad, of the general Qassem Soleimani, architect of the regional strategy of Iran, and expected to a replica of Washington.

It is in this context that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards shot down the plane by launching two surface-to-air missiles shortly after the aircraft took off from Tehran airport. The 176 people on board, mostly Iranians and Canadians, but also 11 Ukrainians (including the nine crew members) perished. The Iranian authorities then recognized a "disastrous error".

"A radar system alignment error caused a human error. An operator forgot to readjust the system after moving to a new position, an error that contributed to an erroneous reading of the radar data", it can be read in a report published Saturday, July 11 in the evening on the website of Civil Aviation (CAO).

"Dangerous chain"

This initial fault "is at the origin of a dangerous chain (of events) which of course could have been controlled if other measures had been taken", writes the CAD. But according to his document, presented as a "report on the facts" and not as the final report of the investigation, other errors took place in the minutes that followed.

Civil Aviation thus notes a defect in the transmission of data on the target identified by the radar to the coordination center of the defense units. An Iranian general said in January that a number of communications had been scrambled that night. The CAD notes that despite the erroneous information available to him about the trajectory of the aircraft, the operator of the radar system could have identified his target as an airliner, but on the contrary, he was wrong in the analysis and there was "misidentification". 

The report also notes that the first of the two missiles fired at the plane was fired by the operator of a defense battery "without having received a response from the coordination center" on which he depended. The second missile was fired thirty seconds later taking into account "the continuity of the trajectory of the detected target", adds the report.

Technical assistance from the French BEA 

In late June, the French Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA) reported that Iran had formally requested technical assistance from Iran to repair and download the black box data. Work on the black boxes should start on July 20, according to the BEA.

In early July, Canada announced that it had obtained an agreement in principle from Iran to launch negotiations on compensation for the families of foreign victims. According to Ottawa, the "coordination group" of countries, whose nationals died in the crash (Canada, United Kingdom, Ukraine, Sweden and Afghanistan), signed a "memorandum of understanding" formally opening the way to negotiations with Tehran.

With AFP and Reuters 

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