Iran announced it arrested multiple suspects in relation to the Jan. 8 jetliner crash of Ukrainian jetliner flight PS752. However, there are contradicting accounts on who was actually arrested.
Iran’s Press TV reported that the Iranian Judiciary Commission detained a number of suspects “for their role in the plane crash,” according to Turkey’s Anadolu Agency.
New York Times journalist and Iran expert Farnaz Fassihi reported on Twitter on Jan. 14 that the man who took video footage of the plane being struck by a missile was arrested.
The information about the arrests was released in a statement by Judiciary Commission spokesman Ghulam Hussein Ismaili, two days after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) acknowledged on Jan. 11 that it accidentally shot down the Ukrainian jetliner, killing all 176 people aboard.
However, according to Nariman Gharib, an Iranian journalist in exile who uploaded the video, his informant is still safe.
“They have arrested the WRONG person regarding the #Flight752 In Iran. The person who is a source of the video is SAFE and I can assure you IRGC is orchestrating another lie,” wrote Gharib on Twitter. “They killed 176 passengers on [a] commercial plane. That’s the real story here,” he said.
Several alleged videos of the missile strike on the plane have surfaced in the aftermath of the catastrophic attack that downed the flight to Kyiv over Tehran on Jan. 8, in the midst of the Iran-U.S. conflict.
Gharib’s video only shows one apparent missile strike, but recently a security video surfaced that reportedly shows two missiles fired at the airplane, some 23 seconds apart from each other.
The new video, obtained by the New York Times, would explain why the flight transponder stopped working before the moment of the impact of the (second) rocket, as it had already been destroyed by the first missile.
Epoch Times reporter Venus Upadhayaya contributed to this report.
