Authorities in Ukraine are not ruling out that one of its planes, which crashed early Wednesday in Iran killing all 176 passengers and crew, was brought down by a missile or an attack amid heightened tensions between Tehran and Washington.
The Ukrainian International airliner bound for the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, plunged from the sky minutes after takeoff from the Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran.
The Boeing 737-800 was last seen on radar at 2,400 metres, according to the FlightRadar 24 monitoring website, hours after Tehran launched more than a dozen ballistic missiles at US facilities in neighbouring Iraq.
“We must investigate all possible causes,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on Facebook, shortly after Iranian officials said the crash was caused by a fire that struck one of the plane’s engines, causing the pilots to lose control.
Zelenskyy has ordered Ukrainian prosecutors to open an investigation into the crash.
Shortly before Zelenskyy’s announcement, Ukraine’s embassy in Iran removed a statement that ruled out the attacks from its website, Ukrainian media reported.
The Ukrainian UNIAN news agency quoted the Jordanian Al Hadath news outlet as claiming that the plane had been shot down by Iranian air force by mistake.
“Until the official investigation is over, naming any version would be manipulation,” Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk told a news conference in response to a question about the possibility of a missile or attack on the plane.
Most of the passengers on board the plane were from Iran, but there were also 63 Canadian nationals, and 138 of those on board had onward connections to Canada.
The Tehran-Toronto route via Kyiv route was popular with Canadians of Iranian descent.
The country’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada, which broke off diplomatic relations with Iran in 2012, should play a significant role in any investigation into the crash.
“Canada is one of a handful of countries with a high degree of expertise when it comes to these sorts of accidents and therefore we have much to contribute,” Trudeau said.
Iranian officials said the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, known as “black boxes,” which will be crucial to establishing the cause of the crash, had been found.
“The rumours about the plane are completely false and no military or political expert has confirmed it,” General Abolfazl Shekarchi, spokesman for the Iranian armed forces, was quoted by the semi-official Fars news agency as saying.
He said the speculation was “psychological warfare” by the government’s opponents.
As well as the 82 Iranians and 63 Canadians, there were 10 passengers from Sweden, four from Afghanistan, three Germans and three Britons.
In December, Boeing’s CEO Dennis Muilenburg was removed after one of the company’s most disastrous years.
Two 737 Max planes crashed in 2018, and all Max planes worldwide have been grounded.
