Multiple new versions and speculations over the reason of the deadly Ukrainian plane crash in Iran have come out in the day after the disaster. Meanwhile, an official probe on the ground has only started.
All 176 persons aboard the Ukrainian International Airlines Boeing-737-800 passenger jet, including 11 Ukrainians, were killed early on Jan. 8 as the aircraft crashed in blazes near the Tehran airport 2 minutes after takeoff, triggering a worldwide uproar amid an ongoing military standoff between Iran and the United States.
On Jan. 9, an inquiry by the Iran Civil Aviation Organization made public its earliest conclusions, saying that the aircraft had been seen engulfed in flames in the air before the crash.
Besides, the crew was supposedly trying to pilot the burning aircraft back to the Tehran airport, but they did not request help in radio communications.
The commission also said the falling concluded with a “powerful blast” on the ground, assuming it happened because the aircraft was fully fueled.
The conclusions were made based on eyewitness accounts from the ground and the board of another aircraft present in the area during the accident.
Other than that, the Iranian commission said that the Boeing black boxes had been found but they were damaged, which means that parts of their data were lost in the crash.
Early in the day, an operative group of nearly 45 Ukrainian aviation safety experts, both military and civilian, including employees of the Ukrainian International Airlines company, arrived in Tehran to investigate the crash.
According to Oleksiy Danylov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, a commission that includes the Iran Civil Aviation Organization experts contemplated the following versions of the crash:
- the aircraft’s engine collapse due to malfunction
- a clash with an unmanned aerial vehicle or some other flying object
- an explosion inside the aircraft’s cabin as a result of an act of terrorism
- the aircraft’s downing with a Tor missile surface-to-air system
Danylov said the commission included the version with the Tor M1 missile surface-to-air system (NATO reporting name SA-15 Gauntlet), because the information regarding the debris of the Russian-produced missile found near the crash site “has appeared on the internet.”
Pictures of a fired-off Tor missile head allegedly found near the Boeing-737 crash location near Tehran were spread across social media earlier in the day. The publications have encouraged speculations that the Ukrainian flight could be mistakenly downed by the Iranian air defense forces amid tension following Tehran’s missile strike upon the U.S. military facilities in Iraq just hours before the crash on Jan. 8.
However, as the Bellingcat investigating group head Eliot Higgins noted on Twitter, the images could be very hard to verify and geolocate due to insufficient quantity of details visible.
Second image (right) of Tor anti-aircraft missile debris, supposedly from near the #PS752 crash site. Still unverified, and still going to be very hard to geolocate it based on what’s visible in the image. h/t @Liberalist_30 pic.twitter.com/TQNRp6hopj
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) January 9, 2020
Danylov also added that the investigation commission now includes some experts who were “involved in investigating the attack of Russian military servicepeople against the Malaysian MH17 flight on July 17, 2014, in Ukraine’s airspace, as well as in the examination of fragments of Russian Buk missile that downed the Malaysian aircraft.”
“It is known that our experts have demonstrated high professionalism in this case,” Danylov added.
However, Western intelligence appears to be inclined to repel the missile version. Five sources in American, European and Canadian security services told the Reuters news agency that their initial assessment was that the plane had suffered a technical malfunction rather than was downed with a missile.
“There was evidence that one of the jet’s engines had overheated,” Reuters reported on Jan. 8, referring to its Canadian source.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky declared Jan. 9 the national day of mourning.
“Establishing the accident’s cause is surely a priority to Ukraine,” Zelensky said in his Jan. 9 address to the nation. “We will certainly discover the truth. A detailed and independent investigation will be conducted for the sake of this.”
The Ukrainian authorities expect all of the Ukrainian aviation experts sent to Tehran to be involved in transcribing the aircraft black boxes, Zelensky said.
Besides, the Ukrainian president called upon restraining from “manipulations, speculations, conspiracy theories, hurried point-blank assessments and other unverified versions,” especially given that Russia wages information war against Ukraine.
“Currently, our information space is filled with numerous theories and speculations regarding the tragedy,” he said. “It is understood that we all want to learn the truth as soon as possible. And in such circumstances, a rush can hamper the truth (from being revealed). It is necessary to wait at least until the investigation commission’s preliminary report is published.”
