Iran convicts military officers found guilty of shooting down UIA plane in 2020 - longest sentence is 10 years
Iran has sentenced 10 military personnel to prison on charges of involvement in the downing of a Ukrainian airliner in 2020, which killed 176 people.
As informs Censor.NЕТ, this is stated by Radio Svoboda.
On April 16, the publication reported that one commander was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and nine others received sentences ranging from one to three years.
"The trial was one of the most important, delicate and complex trials in the country over the past few years," the website said.
It is noted that the actions of the commander who led the downing of the plane "were due to his ignorance of the situation and his mistaken belief that the identified target was hostile."
The commander of the Tor M-1 anti-aircraft missile system "fired two missiles" at the airliner "contrary to orders" and without obtaining permission, the report says.
At the same time, none of the accused were named.
"Given the scale of the impact and consequences of this event, the main defendant was sentenced to the maximum penalty," the newspaper wrote.
As a reminder, the UIA Boeing-737, which was to have operated flight PS752 on the Tehran-Kyiv route, crashed on January 8, 2020, after taking off from Tehran's Imam Khomeini Airport. There were 168 passengers and 9 crew members on board, all of whom died. Most of those killed in the plane crash were Canadian and Iranian citizens.
On the morning of January 11, Iran admitted that the Ukrainian Airlines plane was shot down by the Iranian military by mistake.
The media reported that Iran was pushing Ukraine to sign a memorandum of understanding. It offers our country to recognize the incident as a "human error" and to drop its lawsuits in exchange for compensation and the disclosure of the black boxes.
The decryption of the black boxes of the Ukraine International Airlines plane shot down in Iran in January confirmed that the plane went down as a result of a missile strike and that it was in service at the time.
In February 2021, Canadian media reported that a secret recording from Iran indicated that the missile hit on the UIA plane could have been intentional.
On May 21, it became known that the Ontario Superior Court of Justice concluded that two missile strikes on a Ukrainian plane shortly after takeoff from the airport of the Iranian capital Tehran on January 8, 2020, "were intentional."
On November 21, 2021, a military court in Iran began to consider the case of the downing of the UIA plane.
