Iran has sent the black boxes of the Ukrainian Boeing that felled in January over Tehran to France, an Iranian deputy foreign minister told the reformist daily Etemad on Saturday. "The black boxes were transported to Paris yesterday by civil aviation officials and by a judge, and the decryption operation will start on Monday," said Mohsen Baharvand, deputy foreign minister in charge of legal and international affairs.
The Iranian armed forces admitted on January 11 that they had “mistakenly” shot down three days earlier the Boeing flying Ukrainian Airlines flight PS 752 between Tehran and Kiev shortly after taking off from Tehran International Airport. The tragedy claimed the lives of the 176 people on board the plane, mostly Iranians and Canadians, many of them binational.
A "human error" at the origin of the drama
The French Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA) said at the end of June that Iran had officially asked for its technical assistance to repair and download the data from the black boxes. "The French government has had very good cooperation with the Iranian delegation, for which I thank France," added Mohsen Baharvand. Work on the black boxes should start on July 20, according to the BEA.
The Iranian ministry said in June that the process of sending black boxes had been delayed by the pandemic of new coronavirus, which hit Iran hard and resulted in the cancellation of most international flights. The latest report of the Iranian Civil Aviation published in mid-July indicated that the "key element" at the origin of the drama was a "human error", namely the bad setting of a military radar followed by other malfunctions .
The black boxes should contain information about the final moments of the aircraft before it was struck by two surface-to-air missiles and crashed. Iran's air defenses were on high alert that day after the Islamic Republic fired missiles at an Iraqi base housing American soldiers to avenge the mighty Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, killed in a strike of American drone in Baghdad on January 3.
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