"No wise person would think that we intentionally caused the plane to crash," Mohammad Dehghan, Iran’s Vice-President for Legal Affairs, told IRNA late on Tuesday.
Referring to the recent verdict delivered by an Iranian military court to those who were involved in the downing of the Ukrainian passenger plane, Dehghan said that the ruling will surely affect the international dimensions of the case as certain countries will continue to capitalize on it for their own ends.
He said that hostility against Iran causes enemies to claim that the incident occurred intentionally while the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has announced that the incident was technical, Dehghan underlined.
“We have a duty to follow the case to prove Islamic Republic’s innocence although we are sad and sorrowful about this incident,” he added.
Based on the ruling issued on Sunday (April 16), an unidentified first defendant in the Ukrainian plane crash case received a 13-year prison sentence. The military officer, who had served as commander of the missile operation when the downing happened, had considered the Ukrainian plane to be a cruise missile and decided to shoot it down without permission from superior authorities in the aviation command.
Other suspects in the case received jail sentences of up to three years.
The court said the verdicts can be appealed within the next 20 days.
Ukraine's passenger plane was reportedly moving very close to a sensitive military location belonging to the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) when it crashed shortly after taking off from Imam Khomeini International Airport (IKA) near Tehran on January 8, 2020. All 176 aboard the plane were killed.
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