Black Box from Plane Shot Down by IRGC Finally Arrives in France
François-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s foreign minister, says the black box containing flight data from the Ukrainian aircraft that was shot down by an Iranian missile is in Paris and is expected to be handed over to the “French Bureau of Enquiry into Civil Aviation Accidents” on Monday for analysis.
Champagne said in a tweet that officials from the “Canadian Transportation Safety Board” will be present during these investigations.
The majority of the 176 passengers on that flight were Canadian citizens or heading to Canada.
Iran says its military forces mistakenly identified this Ukrainian aircraft as a missile fired toward Iran and shot it down shortly after it took off from the runway at Tehran airport.
This incident occurred at the height of tensions between Iran and the United States, when Iran had fired several missiles at an American military base in Iraq in response to the killing of Qasem Soleimani.
Canada, Ukraine, and other countries whose citizens were passengers on this aircraft have called for a complete investigation into the matter, and the analysis of black box data recovered from the aircraft wreckage is at the center of these investigations.
On the morning of Wednesday, December 9, a Boeing 737 passenger aircraft of Ukrainian Airlines with 176 people on board was shot down by the air defense systems of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shortly after taking off from an airport on the outskirts of Tehran. After several days of insistence by Iranian officials, who claimed the plane crash was due to a technical defect, the IRGC finally announced that it had mistakenly targeted the aircraft.
Earlier, Human Rights Watch had accused Iranian officials of “as usual, shirking responsibility and, instead of providing details of investigations into shooting down the plane and those responsible for the fatal error, condemning individuals who had protested the deaths of 176 people.”
Source: Voice of America
