| Резюме: | When Navaz Ebrahim learned that a Ukrainian plane had fallen from the sky near Iran’s capital, she didn’t realize her older sister was on the flight. They had just spoken on the phone. Niloufar had promised her, like she always does, that everything was going to be alright. As news spread of the jetliner that burst into flames and plunged to the ground, killing all 176 on board, Ebrahim called her mother in Tehran, desperate to hear that her 34-year-old sister and brother-in-law, newly married in the northern mountains of Iran, had taken any other plane home to London. Then her mother checked the flight number. A year after Iran’s military mistakenly downed Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 with two surface-to-air missiles, the answers that have emerged from the disaster only seem to lead to more questions. Officials in Canada, which was home to many of the passengers on board, and other affected countries have raised concerns about the lack of transparency and accountability in Iran’s investigation of its own military, while grieving families allege harassment by Iranian authorities. “Without knowing what really happened to them, we’re stuck in that same horrible night,” said Ebrahim, who lives in Dallas, Texas. “We haven’t received anything close to the truth.” The shootdown ignited an outburst of unrest across Iran, deepened public mistrust in the government and further damaged Iran’s relations with the West. After three days of denial in the face of mounting evidence, Iran admitted its own aerial defense forces downed the plane by mistake. Just hours before the crash, Iran had fired ballistic missiles at American bases in Iraq in retaliation for the U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. The strike pushed Washington and Tehran to the precipice of war. On alert and fearful of American reprisals even as commercial air traffic was allowed to continue, lower-level officers mistook the Boeing 737-800 for a U.S. cruise missile, authorities later reported. After receiving no response from higher command, a missile operator opened fire in violation of protocol. The civilian airliner, bound for the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, exploded. The bodies of the passengers — including 82 Iranians, 57 Canadians and 11 Ukrainians — were burned beyond recognition and strewn across a field near the village of Shahedshahr just outside of Tehran. They were students, recent graduates, newlyweds, doctors, parents and children. The youngest was a 1 year-old girl. In the immediate aftermath, Iran denied international accusations of the shootdown and tried to clear the crash site. Bulldozers rolled into the farmland, sweeping up the plane’s debris, according to accounts in a Canadian government report released last month. Local villagers picked over the wreckage, pocketing valuables. Ebrahim saw nothing of Niloufar’s wedding gifts, gold coins and jewels, but received her brother-in-law’s wallet, intact and empty. “Clearing the site is very unusual, and absolutely against ICAO procedure of cataloguing every piece of evidence,” said Jeffrey Price, a professor of aviation at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, referring to the U.N.’s civilian aviation arm. Further undermining its credibility, Iran refused to hand over the plane’s black boxes — flight data and cockpit voice recorders — for over six months. Multiple families said the cellphones of their loved ones were either withheld or returned with memory chips removed, raising […]
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