According to the official judiciary news agency, a court in Iran has found 10 air defense force members guilty of shooting down a Ukrainian passenger plane in Tehran in 2020.
One defendant, identified as the commander of the Tor-M1 surface-to-air missile defense system responsible for shooting down the airliner on January 8, 2020, received a prison sentence of 13 years, minus time served, according to the judiciary’s official Mizan. Nine of those sentenced on Sunday, April 16, received prison terms between one and three years.
On January 8, 2020, shortly after departure from Imam Khomeini International Airport, the jet was struck by two surface-to-air missiles, killing everyone on board, the majority of whom were Iranian and Canadian citizens.
When the plane was shot down, it appeared that war between the US and Iran was about to break out.
According to the news agency, the commander received a 10-year term for disobeying directives and a three-year sentence for approving “the murder of the passengers of the Ukrainian plane.”
Additionally, the commander was ordered to make restitution to the 176 families of those lost on Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752.
The court stated that the unidentified shooter did so because of “his ignorance of the matter and his mistaken idea of the discovered target, and believing that the target was hostile and approaching.”
The Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims criticized the Iranian court’s decision as being invalid.
“This court did not prosecute the commanders and main perpetrators of this crime, introduced 10 accused low-ranking officers with total obscurity of their backgrounds and identities, held sessions in private, flouted the families who attended the hearings and ultimately issued a sham ruling to end this show in keeping with their predetermined scenario without conducting any full, impartial investigation,” it said in a statement.
Iran was put on high alert the morning the airliner was shot down as its military had just launched a premeditated strike against U.S. positions in Iraq, which was in response to the United States assassinating Iran’s Qasem Soleimani, head of an elite unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Tehran had initially blamed the downing on a mechanical failure, but days later, and while under international pressure, said it was the result of “human error,” claiming the operator of a surface-to-air missile launcher misidentified the departing plane for an incoming threat.
The court on Sunday said the downing of Flight 752 was the result of the commander misidentifying the plane and that the person fired “without obtaining permission and contrary to the relevant instructions.”
Following an investigation in 2021, Canada said it holds Iran’s high-ranking civilian and military authorities “fully responsible” for shooting down the aircraft, while calling Tehran’s official account of what happened “disingenuous, misleading and superficial.”