International investigators in Paris will finally be able to review the black box of a downed Ukrainian passenger jet that was fired from the sky by Iran, which mistakenly identified the plane as an incoming missile.
Iranian authorities sent the black box to France on Friday, signaling a new phase of the investigation for six months after the January incident that killed 176 people, including 82 Iranians, 57 Canadians and 11 Ukrainians.
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France is one of the few countries with the ability to read damaged black boxes. Information obtained from the device could shed light on factors, such as the flight path and altitude of the plane, that made the plane the target of such a fatal shot.
Although the downed plane was a Boeing 737-800, a U.S. company, the United States, caught in a continuing feud with Tehran, refused to provide a converter to Iranian experts, which was necessary to retrieve the data from the box.
The plane was en route to Kiev on January 8 when it was shot down hours after Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on two military bases that host US and coalition troops in Iraq. Those attacks were in retaliation for the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in a US airstrike in Baghdad.
In this Jan. 8, 2020 file photo, rescuers search the scene where a Ukrainian plane crashed in Shahedshahr, southwest Tehran, Iran. (AP Photo / Ebrahim Noroozi, File)
Initially, Iran attributed the accident to technical problems and only acknowledged having shot down the plane days later.
US military officials said they believed Iran mistakenly shot down the plane using a surface-to-air missile. This conclusion was supported by videos that purportedly showed light moving rapidly through the trees before a fireball illuminated the landscape.
Iran has been in intense negotiations with Ukraine, Canada and other nations that had citizens on board the downed plane and who have demanded a thorough investigation of the incident.
Tehran’s civil aviation authority invited other interested countries to read the data from the black box analysis, Farhad Parvaresh, head of Iran’s delegation to the UN International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), told Reuters. last week.
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Morgan Phillips of Fox News and Associated Press contributed to this report.
