MONTREAL, March 12 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Iran pledged at a meeting of UN civil aviation agency to hand over black boxes from downed Flight 752 to Ukraine or France for analysis – a move welcomed by Canada and Ukraine.
Iran’s representative at the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal, Farhad Parvaresh, said the devices would be sent to Kiev.
They are expected to contain information about the last moments before the Ukraine International Airlines jetliner was struck by a missile and crashed shortly after taking off from the Tehran airport on Jan 8.
In Ottawa, Canadian Foreign Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne “welcomed” Iran’s commitment to finally share the black boxes, saying this was “a step in the right direction by Iran.”
Ukraine’s ambassador to Canada, Andriy Schevchenko, in a tweet said his country also “welcomes Iran’s decision” to hand them over, adding that “if additional expertise is needed,” the flight data recorders would be forwarded to France for analysis.
Iran has admitted that the two black boxes were damaged and that it lacked the technical ability to extract data from them.
Countries whose citizens died in the disaster – which included mostly Iranians but also Afghans, Britons, Canadians, Swedes and Ukrainians – had criticised Iran’s refusal to hand the plane’s black boxes to Ukraine or one of the few countries capable of recovering and analysing the data they contain.
The ICAO also pressed the Islamic republic “to conduct the accident investigation in a timely manner” in compliance with international accident investigation provisions.
The disaster unfolded as Iran’s defences were on high alert in case the US retaliated to Iranian strikes hours earlier on American troops stationed in Iraq – which were themselves in response to the US assassination of a top Iranian commander.
In the immediate aftermath, Iranian civilian authorities insisted the crash was likely caused by a technical malfunction, vehemently denying claims the plane was shot down.
But in the early hours of Jan 11, the Iranian military admitted that the plane was shot down due to “human error,” killing 176 people.
