Tehran: The black box of a Ukrainian passenger plane that was mistakenly downed near Tehran is still in Iran and no decision has been made to send it abroad, a civil aviation official said.
“We are trying to examine the black box of the crashed Ukrainian plane in Iran and our next options will be Ukraine and France,” Hassan Rezaifar, the Director General of the Civil Aviation Organization of the Islamic Republic of Iran (CAO.IRI), said on Sunday.
“But no decision has been made so far to send the box to a second country,” he added.
With 167 passengers and nine crewmembers on board, the Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 crashed outside Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport on January 8, shortly after take off, reports Press TV. Two days later, the Iranian armed forces admitted to have downed the airliner “unintentionally since it flew too close to a sensitive military site.
Sunday’s remarks come after Iran’s Tasnim news agency on Saturday had quoted Rezaeifar as saying that Tehran will send the black box to Ukraine.
The crash came on the same day Iranian missiles attacked two military bases in Iraq that housed US troopers, which came as a retaliation to the January 3 killing of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani by an American drone in Baghdad. (IANS)
