Canada, Sweden, Ukraine and the United Kingdom are taking Iran to the International Court of Justice in The Hague for the accidental downing of a passenger plane in January 2020. International news agencies reported this on Wednesday. All 176 people on board were killed in the crash. With this case, the countries want to enforce compensation for the relatives.
According to the prosecutors, Iran has not taken sufficient measures to prevent such incidents. The country has also not conducted a proper investigation into the downing of the Ukrainian plane.
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Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 was flying from Tehran to Kiev on January 8, 2020 when it was shot down shortly after takeoff. Mostly Iranians and Canadians were on board. Ukrainians, Swedes, Afghans and British were also killed.
Incorrect radar system setting
After three days of denial, Iran finally admitted that its paramilitary Revolutionary Guards had accidentally shot down the Ukrainian plane with two surface-to-air missiles. Iranian authorities blamed soldiers from an Iranian air defense unit. They would have ‘forgotten’ to adjust the settings of the radar system, as a result of which the civilian aircraft was mistaken for a cruise missile. In addition, communication with the military commanders to obtain permission for the firing would also have gone wrong.
The downing of the airliner happened on the same day that Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on a United States military base in neighboring Iraq. The country did this in retaliation for a US drone attack that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.
This year, an Iranian court sentenced a soldier allegedly responsible for downing the plane to 13 years in prison. But Canada, Sweden, Ukraine and the UK called his prosecution “an opaque mock trial.”