Five nations call upon Iran to ‘deliver justice’ on downed plane

COPENHAGEN: The countries whose citizens were killed when Iran accidentally shot down a Ukrainian jetliner said on Friday they want the country to deliver justice and make sure it makes full reparations to the families of the victims and affected countries.

In a joint statement marking the one-year anniversary of the Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 crash, Ukraine, France, Canada, Britain and Sweden said they want Tehran to provide a complete and thorough explanation of the events and decisions that led to this appalling plane crash.

Sweden earlier had said that Iran had agreed to compensate the families of the foreign victims.

The shootdown by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard happened the same night Iran launched a ballistic missile attack targeting US soldiers in Iraq, its response to the American drone strike that killed Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on Jan 3. The plane was en route to the Ukrainian capital.

On Friday, relatives, friends and colleagues of the Ukrainian crew and passengers attended a ceremony at the site of a future memorial to the victims on the banks of the Dnipro river.

The victims included 57 Canadian citizens as well as 11 Ukrainians, 17 people from Sweden, four Afghans and four British citizens. Those from Sweden included both Swedish nationals and people with staying permits in the Scandinavian country.

At first, Iran had denied its involvement in the plane crash but then announced that its military had mistakenly and unintentionally shot down the Ukrainian jetliner.

The statement was signed by ministers of Afghanistan, Canada, Sweden, Ukraine and United Kingdom.

Ukraine’s government vowed on Friday to bring to justice those who downed a Ukrainian passenger jet in Iran, as hundreds gathered in Kiev to mourn the victims on the first anniversary of their deaths.

“I assure you that the prosecutor’s office and Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies are doing and continue to do everything to establish the truth and bring the perpetrators to justice,” deputy prosecutor general Gyunduz Mamedov told the victim’s relatives during the ceremony.

Portraits of the victims were displayed on a large screen and tearful mourners laid flowers at a stone bearing a plaque inscribed with “PS 752” and the date of the downing.

“I wish none of this had happened,” German Kozionov, a UIA pilot and friend of the ill-fated flight’s crew members, said. “I still think of them as living people. Good people who lived.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Facebook that “we are moving towards” bring those responsible to justice and securing compensation payments.

“The shelf life of such crimes cannot expire,” he wrote. Human Rights Watch said that Iranian authorities have failed to conduct a transparent and credible investigation into the shooting down of Flight 752.

It added that more than a dozen of the victims’ families had told the watchdog that Iranian authorities had “intimidated and harassed” them to stop them from seeking justice outside of official probes.