The
CAO said in an interim report that the plane was accidentally
downed, killing 176 people on board, because of a misalignment
of a radar system and lack of communication between the air
defence operator and his commanders.
But Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told an online
briefing that many questions remained unanswered.
"I want to clearly emphasise: it is early to say that the plane
was shot down as a result of human error, as the Iranian side
claims," he said. "We have many questions, and we need a large
number of authoritative, unbiased, objective answers about what
happened."
Iran's Revolutionary Guards shot down the Ukraine International
Airlines flight with a ground-to-air missile on Jan. 8 shortly
after the plane took off from Tehran. Iran later called it a
"disastrous mistake" by forces who were on high alert during a
confrontation with the United States.
Tehran said last month said it would send the black box flight
recorders from the downed airliner to France for analysis and
that experts from the United States, Canada, France, Britain and
Ukraine would take part in the decoding.
Kuleba said an Iranian delegation was due to arrive in Kiev
later this month to discuss compensation. Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in February Kiev was not satisfied with
the size of compensation Iran had offered.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
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