TEHRAN – Iran asked Canada to share information about the causes of the Ukrainian International Airlines’ plane crash near Tehran after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s remarks on the issue.
On Thursday, Trudeau said at a press conference that Canada had intelligence data revealing that the jet that crashed outside of Tehran a day earlier was shot down by a surface-to-air missile.
“[Iran] asks the Canadian prime minister and any other government to share information on this incident they possess to the committee in charge of investigating the incident in Iran,” , Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said in a statement on late Thursday.
He added that Iran had invited Ukrainian experts as well as representatives of the Boeing company to join the investigation into causes of the crash.
A video published on the internet by the New York Times, which said it had verified the images as authentic, that purportedly shows a Ukrainian passenger jet being hit near Tehran’s international airport and then exploding as it hit the ground was.
The edited video, released on Thursday, begins with scores of fireballs hitting the ground against the backdrop of a darkened sky before showing a rocket plume streaking across the sky. An apparent collision comes next, quickly by a ground-level explosion that sent a red flash on the horizon.
The accident took place minutes after Iran’s massive missile attack on US bases in Iraq in response to the killing of the Quds Force commander, Qasem Soleimani. Tehran has said, citing preliminary data, that the reason behind the incident was a technical malfunction, while US President Donald Trump has expressed his doubts about that being the case.
The flight went down in the dark just minutes after takeoff, with no radio message from the pilot to indicate distress, according to the Iranian Civil Aviation Organization.
The Boeing 737-800 plane, flying to Kiev, crashed on Wednesday near Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport shortly after takeoff, killing all 176 people on board, including 82 Iranians, 63 Canadians, 11 Ukrainians, 10 Swedes, four Afghans, three Germans and three Britons on board.
