Evidence Shows Iran Knew It Shot Down Civilian Airliner, Says Ukrainian President
President Zelenskiy: Leaked audio “proves that the Iranian side knew from the start that our plane had been hit by a missile.”
Iran knew all along that it had shot down the civilian airliner, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy revealed on Sunday.
The Ukrainians based their claims on the leaked recording of an Iranian pilot informing Tehran’s air traffic control about a missile hitting the Ukrainian plane.
On January 8, the Iranian military shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet shortly after it took off from Tehran International Airport. All 176 passengers and crew died in the missile attack.
The audio recording of the Iranian pilot who witnessed the explosion proved that the Iranian regime knew all along that its missile had hit the airliner.
“He says that ‘it seems to me that a missile is flying,’ he says it in both Persian and English, everything is fixed there,” President Zelenskiy said in a televised interview.
Tehran responded to the disclosure by refusing to share evidence from the airline crash with Ukraine.
“Iran has ceased co-operation with Ukraine in its investigation into the downing of Ukrainian passenger jet,” BBC reported on Monday. The Iranian response suggests that there is still more to the downing of the plane than the regime is willing to admit.
Reuters reported the revelations made by the Ukrainian president:
A leaked audio recording of an Iranian pilot talking to the control tower in Tehran shows that Iran knew immediately it had shot down a Ukrainian airliner last month, despite denying it for days, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.
On the recording, played on a Ukrainian television station late on Sunday, the pilot of another plane can be heard saying he saw “the light of a missile” in the sky before Ukrainian International Airways flight 752 crashed in an explosion.
Tehran blamed the Ukrainian authorities for leaking what it described as confidential evidence, and said it would no longer share material with Ukraine from the investigation into the crash. (…)
The leaked audio “proves that the Iranian side knew from the start that our plane had been hit by a missile,” Zelenskiy said 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.
The recording raises more questions about the Iranian version of the incident. After blaming the crash on mechanical failure, Iranian authorities bulldozed the crash cite and cleared the debris in an apparent attempt to destroy the evidence. Tehran also refuses to hand over the flight data recorders, or black boxes, to the Ukrainians or a neutral third party.
Tehran initially dismissed the claims that a missile hit the Ukrainian plane, calling them a “big lie” and “psychological warfare” by the United States. But confronted with undeniable evidence, the regime backtracked, blaming the shooting on “human error.” The Iranian admission of guilt was even more bizarre than its previous denials. The Iranian air defense had “mistaken” a Boeing 737 taking off from its airport for an incoming U.S. cruise missile, the regime claimed.
The downing of the plane took place days after a U.S. drone strike eliminated Qassem Soleimani, chief of Iran’s elite Quds Force, a U.S. designated terrorist group. He was behind the storming of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in late December and was directly responsible for the killing of hundreds of American servicemen and women in Iraq.
The regime paraded the coffin of the dead terrorist across Tehran. Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared jihad on America to avenge the slain terrorist. The shooting of the Ukranian airliner reignited anti-regime protests across the country. Tehran had barely managed to crush the November uprising by gunning down over a thousand unarmed protesters.
‘Apparent Iranian Missile Strike On Airliner: Investigator Explains Video Evidence’
[Cover image via YouTube]
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
bet Trump “made” him do it…
No, it was George Soros!!!1!!!11!
Reading the comment sections of other sites, Soros gets a lot of credit for things I doubt even he has anything to do with.
I wouldn’t be underestimating him or be trying to excuse him.
Russian operators of the Iranian missile battery, Ukrainian plane…..those Russians.
Poor optics.
I suspect Iran killed somebody who was escaping “justice.” The others are just collateral damage in a totalitarian culture where life has little value if any.
Yes, I heard that theory too. I wish someone would do some forensics on the manifest.
Perhaps if they looked at the passenger list they would see this was something beyond an “accident”.
Never attribute to malice what can be adequitely explained by incompetence.
Yeah. Too many people can’t just accept that people do totally incompetent things like accidentally shoot an airliner out of the sky. They always have to make it a conspiracy.
Iran shot this plane down by mistake. The idiots running the missile launcher failed to do their jobs properly and they shot the plane down.
Not everything bad that happens is a conspiracy.
Iran has intentionally brought planes and building down, often with a proxy. They are perfectly capable of taking the plane down, calculating that they could get away with doing so, just like every other terrorist action they are behind.
Iran needs to be B slapped. I figure that taking out their hydroelectric dams and water reservoirs is a good way to punish them. It sends a message short of nuking them. And this would really hurt them.
It’s okay to lie to confuse the infidels. Cultural difference.
Be it incompetence or malice, what is the Ukraine going to do about it? That’s the real question. The mad ayatollahs are counting on the answer being, “nothing”.
Send some experts to help with their nuclear program.
Don’t stand downwind when they get going.
I would be fine with nuking them, but nailing their water source and electrical power is a good warm up exercise.
Other airline companies should give serious thought to the dangers of flying to Iran in general and to Tehran specifically. An airline boycott of Iran may make the regime reconsider its noncooperation with investigating the downing of the Ukrainian airliner.
A normal country, yes. Iran? Not sure that the Mad Ayatollahs will respond as you and I would.
Closing Iranian airspace to civilian aircraft from foreign countries would get their attention but there’s no way to enforce that.
better to destroy their airports, that is a form of terro and they most certainly understand terror.
Declare Iranian air space a war zone. Insurance costs of flying in Iran would make it more expensive.
How could anyone think Iran didn’t know that they shot the airliner down?
Is it clear that I have utter contempt for Iran? 🙂