Iran blames radar glitch for Ukrainian jet crash

TEHERAN－Iran said that the misalignment of an air defense unit's radar system was the key "human error" that led to the accidental downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane in January.

"A failure occurred due to a human error in following the procedure" for aligning the radar, the Iranian Civil Aviation Organization, or CAO, said in a report on Saturday.

This error "initiated a hazard chain" that saw further mistakes committed in the minutes before the plane was shot down, said the CAO document, which was presented as a "factual report" and not as the final report on the accident investigation.

Iran's Islamic 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 Teheran, killing all 176 people on board.

Teheran later acknowledged it as a "disastrous mistake" by forces who were on high alert during a confrontation with the United States.

The report detailed a series of moments where the shooting down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 could have been avoided.

The report said the surface-to-air missile battery that targeted the plane had been relocated and was not properly reoriented.

Those manning the missile battery could not communicate with their command center, and they misidentified the civilian flight as a threat, opening fire twice without getting approval from ranking officials, according to the report.

"If each had not arisen, the aircraft would not have been targeted," the report said.

The report notes that the Ukrainian flight had done nothing out of the ordinary up until the missile launch, with its transponder and other data being broadcast.

"At the time of firing the first missile, the aircraft was flying at a normal altitude and trajectory," the report said.

The plane had just taken off from Imam Khomeini International Airport when the first missile exploded, possibly damaging its radio equipment, the report said. The second missile likely directly struck the aircraft, as videos that night show the plane exploding into a ball of fire before crashing into a playground and farmland on the outskirts of Teheran.

The report put the blame on the crew of the missile battery. Six people believed to be involved in the incident had already been arrested, judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili reportedly said in June. He said at the time that three had been released on bail.

An Iranian general had said in January that many communication links had been jammed on the night of the disaster.

High alert

Teheran's air defenses had been on high alert at the time the jet was shot down in case the US retaliated against Iranian strikes hours earlier on US troops stationed in Iraq.

Those strikes were carried out in response to the killing of a top Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani, in a US drone attack near Baghdad airport.

Ottowa and Kiev have demanded for months that Iran, which does not have the technical means to decode the black boxes, send them abroad so their contents can be analyzed.

Canada's Foreign Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne on Sunday urged Iran to ensure "a comprehensive and transparent investigation in accordance with international standards, so that all those responsible are held accountable".

In late June, France's Accident Investigation Bureau said Iran had "officially requested technical assistance" to retrieve the black box data and said work should begin on July 20.

Agencies Via Xinhua