The development comes months after theJanuary 8 crash near Tehran. Iranian authorities had initially denied responsibility,only changing course days later,after Western nations presented extensive evidence that Iran had shot down the plane.
The shootdown happened the same night Iran launched a ballistic missile attack targeting US soldiers in Iraq,its response to the American drone strike that killed Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on January 3.
At the time,Iranian troops were bracing for a US counterstrike and appear to have mistaken the plane for a missile. Iran,however,has not acknowledged that,only saying that after the ballistic missile attack,its air defense was sufficiently alert and had allowed previously scheduled air traffic to resume – a reference to the Ukrainian plane being allowed to take off from Tehran.
The Ukrainian plane was apparently targeted by two missiles. The plane had just taken off from Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport when the first missile exploded,possibly damaging its radio equipment. The second missile likely directly struck the aircraft,as videos from that night show the plane exploding into a ball of fire before crashing into a playground and farmland on the outskirts of Tehran.
For days after the crash,Iranian investigators combed the site,sifting through the debris of the plane.
The head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation,Captain Touraj Dehghani Zangeneh,said on Sunday that the Ukrainian passenger plane’s black boxes have only 19 seconds of conversation following the first explosion,though the second missile reached the plane 25 seconds later. The report quoting him did not elaborate.