Iranian officials have invited Boeing and Ukraine into the investigation of Wednesday mornings’ crash of Ukrainian Airlines flight PS752, amidst allegations that an Iranian missile shot it down.
The state-run IRNA news agency quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying Iran “has invited both Ukraine and the Boeing company to participate in the investigations.”
“We advise the U.S. government to wait for the results of the accident investigation committee of the Ukrainian plane crash instead of spreading lie and carrying out their psychological operation,” said Ali Rabiei a spokesperson for Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s administration.
Abas Aslani, Chief Editor of Iran’s newspaper FrontPage quoted Ali Rabiei on Twitter.
#Iran‘s administration spokesman Rabi’ei: We advise #US government to wait for the results of accident investigation committee of #Ukranian plane crash, instead of spreading lies & carrying out psychological operation.#IranPlaneCrash
— Abas Aslani (@AbasAslani) January 10, 2020
Some western leaders cautiously proposed the idea that Iran mistakenly shot the plane down.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose country lost 63 lives in the incident, said it is very possible the Uranians downed the jetliner, but it “may have been unintentional.”
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, “There is now a body of information that the flight was shot down by an Iranian surface to air missile.”
President Trump dismissed Iran’s initial explanation that a mechanical problem might have caused the crash. While at the White House on Thursday Trump said: “It (the plane) was flying in a pretty rough neighborhood, and somebody could have made a mistake,” Trump said. “Some people say it was mechanical. I personally don’t think that’s even a question.”
Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council Chief Oleksiy Danilov wrote on social media that “a strike by a missile, possibly a Tor missile system, is among the main [theories], as information has surfaced on the internet about elements of a missile being found near the site of the crash,” according to a Fox News translation.
The crash came a few hours after Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on two Iraqi bases that house U.S. troops. President Donald Trump later confirmed there were no casualties in the missile strike on the two bases and vowed to implement more sanctions on Tehran in response.
The Ukrainian International Airlines flight took off at 6:12 a.m. Jan. 8, after nearly an hour’s delay at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport, the main airport for travelers in Iran. It gained altitude heading west, reaching nearly 8,000 feet, according to both the report and flight-tracking data, The Associated Press reported.
The plane’s black boxes, which contain its flight recorder and cockpit voice recorder, were recovered. Iranian officials initially said they won’t hand them over to Boeing, but later gave Ukrainian investigators access to them, according to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko.
Epoch Times reporter Jack Phillips and the Associated Press contributed to this report.