Iran, Ukraine launch probe into Boeing 737 crash

Yusef Jalali,
Press TV, Iran

A team of Ukrainian experts is in Iran to launch a joint probe into the crash of Boeing 737 which crashed in Iran on Wednesday, killing all 176 people on board. This came a day after the black boxes of the plane were recovered from the crash site.

Informing reporters about the details of the expert sessions, Head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization, Ali Abedzadeh, said Friday that the black boxes are damaged, but the data can be extracted.

The plane took off at 6:12 A.M. on Wednesday from Tehran and was destined for the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. It crashed a few minutes after takeoff and fell to an area west of Tehran.

The majority of victims were Iranian citizens, among them this newlywed Iranian couple who got on board the doomed plane to spend their honeymoon in Ukraine.

Due to severe damage to the black boxes, any solid clue to the cause of the crash is yet to be found, but Iran's Civil Aviation Organization has strongly ruled out any military involvement in the crash, saying such claims are motivated by economic and political agenda.

The crash came hours after Iran's missile attack on a US airbase in Iraq, in a tit-for-tat measure against the US assassination of Iran’s top military figure, Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani.

US officials claim that Iran had mistaken Boeing 737 for an intruding warplane and shot it down; something which Tehran has dismissed as politically motivated.

Reports of a military involvement—and not a system failure—as the cause of the crash have boosted Boeing's market shares, after a sharp fall triggered by the two previous fatal crashes that led to the firing of its CEO and the grounding of its 737 Max.

Experts say it is too early to judge about this last crash, and Iran has promised to maintain close cooperation with all countries that have lost their citizens in the tragedy.

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