Recording shows Iran immediately knew it had shot down plane, says Ukrainian president
A leaked audio recording of a pilot talking to Tehran’s control tower shows that Iran immediately knew it had shot down a Ukranian airliner last month, Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.
On a leaked recording played on Ukranian television late yesterday, the pilot of another plane can be heard saying he saw “the light of a missile” in the sky before the Ukranian International Airways plane crashed.
Iran has blamed Ukranian authorities for the leak of what it described as confidential evidence, and said it would no longer share evidence from the investigation into the crash with Ukraine.
All 176 people on board were killed when the Ukranian plane crashed shortly after taking off from Tehran airport on 8 January.
The leaked audio “proves that the Iranian side knew from the start that our plane had been hit by a missile,” Zelenskiy said today in a television interview.
“He says that ‘it seems to me that a missile is flying’, he says it in both Persian and English, everything is fixed there,” Zelenskiy said.
After denying responsibility for the incident for three days after the crash, Iran acknowledged shooting down the plane.
Iran said it had done so while under high alert just hours after launching missile attacks on US targets in retaliation for a US strike that killed an Iranian military commander.
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Tehran has said it worked as fast as possible to establish what happened to the plane. The Iranian commander who first acknowledged that it was shot down said he informed authorities on the day of the crash.
Iran has come under pressure from Ukraine and other countries whose citizens were on board the crashed plane to send evidence abroad to international investigators.
The official in charge of accident investigations at Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation said it was a “strange move” by Ukraine to release the recording.
“This action by the Ukrainians led to us not sharing any more evidence with them,” the official, Hassan Rezaifar said, according to Iran’s semi-official Mehr news agency.
Ukraine International Airways said in a statement the recording provided “yet more proof” that its plane was “shot down with a missile, and there were no restrictions or warnings from dispatchers of any risk to flights of civilian aircraft in the vicinity of the airport.”