January 2020. Iran’s civil aviation chief denied Friday that an Iranian missile downed a Ukrainian airliner which crashed killing all 176 on board, dismissing Western claims of a catastrophic mistake by the country’s air defences. Iran’s denial came as Tehran faced mounting international pressure to allow a “credible” investigation into the crash, which several Western governments blamed on an accidental missile strike. “One thing is for certain, this airplane was not hit by a missile,” Iran’s civil aviation chief Ali Abedzadeh said, after Tehran invited the US, Ukraine, Canada and others to join the investigation. The cause of the crash is to be announced Saturday after an investigating committee meeting in the presence of foreign and local parties involved, Iran’s Fars news agency said, quoting an “informed source”. Ukraine said its experts had gained access to the black box flight recorders as US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeated it was “likely” an Iran missile downed the plane. The Boeing 737 crashed on Wednesday shortly after Iran launched missiles at US forces in Iraq in response to the killing of a top Iranian general in a US drone strike in Baghdad. It is Iran’s worst civil aviation disaster since 1988 when the US military said it shot down an Iran Air plane over the Gulf by mistake, killing all 290 people on board.
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