By Andrew Irumba & Agency
Tehran: Iran has refuted allegations and rumours being circulated by American and European media houses that passenger flight Boeing 737 was shot down by missiles fired by Iranian military.
Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization (CAO) chief Ali Abedzadeh said on Friday that the Ukrainian plane that recently crashed in Iran had not been hit by a missile, despite such claims from the West, due to preliminary evidence the investigation committee had gathered.
“If the plane had been hit by a missile, the area, in which its pieces were scattered, would be very large, but all parts were in one place”, CAO chief Ali Abedzadeh said.
He added that the investigation team was still waiting for information from the aircraft’s black box.
Abedzadeh also said that the plane’s pilot had called the control tower prior to turning back towards the airport but that the engine caught fire in mid-air and the plane crashed about two minutes later.
Boeing 737 crashed on Wednesday near Tehran, shortly after takeoff, killing all 176 people on board, including citizens from Iran, Canada and Ukraine. The incident occured shortly after Iran’s missile attack on American facilities in Erbil and the Ayn al-Asad Air Base in Iraq.
However, despite the rumours of the plane being hit by Iran military because they thought it was full of Americans, Tehran maintained that the plane crash was caused by a technical error.
But the US, UK, and Canadian authorities claimed that they had obtained footage of a missile being fired at the aircraft from Iran.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier stated that claims about the plane being shot down by a missile could not be excluded, but insisted that they remained unconfirmed.
The president added that he would be holding talks later on Friday with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo regarding the ongoing investigation into the plane crash.
However, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Thursday that evidence indicates an Iranian missile downed a Ukrainian airliner on Wednesday and that the strike “may have been unintentional”.
Trudeau said Canadian and allied intelligence supports that cause. He declined to get into the specific intelligence, but said it appeared it was a surface-to-air missile that struck the plane.
“We have intelligence from multiple sources, including our allies and our own intelligence. The evidence indicates that the plane was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile,” Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa
“This may well have been unintentional.” Tradeu addeded.
Earlier, United States officials said it was “highly likely” that an Iranian anti-aircraft missile downed the airliner, killing all 176 people on board. They suggested it could well have been a mistake. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also said there was a “body of information that the flight was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile”.
He added “this may well have been unintentional”. Iran had earlier dismissed the reports as “illogical rumours”. “It is impossible that a missile hit the Ukrainian plane,” Iran’s head of civil aviation was quoted by Iran’s INSA news agency as saying.
The Ukraine International Airlines plane bound for the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, crashed minutes after takeoff from the Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran on Wednesday amid escalating tensions between the US and Iran.
There were 63 Canadians on board. Iranian investigators released an initial report on Thursday saying that the airliner was on fire and tried turning back but that its crew never made a radio call for help.
That report characterised the incident as an accident. In-depth investigations into airline disasters generally take months.
