Ukraine Wants More Answers from Iran over January Airliner Downing

Ukraine’s foreign minister appears dissatisfied with interim findings from what Iran calls the accidental downing of a Ukrainian International Airlines 737 passenger jet in the pre-dawn hours of January 8. “I want to clearly emphasize: It is early to say that the plane was shot down as a result of human error, as the Iranian side claims,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Tuesday during an online briefing with the press. “We have many questions and we need a large number of authoritative, unbiased, objective answers about what happened.” As part of interim findings, released on July 11, Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization blamed an improperly calibrated radar system used with air defense missiles, as well as a failure to properly communicate among air defense officers and the missile operators. All 176 people on board the flight, which minutes before had taken off from Tehran’s international airport bound for Kiev, were killed. The incident took place with tensions spiking in the region due to attacks and counterattacks between the US and Iran, and critics feel the flight should have been postponed or at least canceled.