Rescue teams work amidst debris after a Ukrainian plane carrying 176 passengers crashed near Imam Khomeini airport in the Iranian capital Tehran early in the morning on January 8, 2020, killing everyone on board. The Boeing 737 had left Tehran's international airport bound for Kiev, semi-official news agency ISNA said, adding that 10 ambulances were sent to the crash site. (Photo by - / AFP)
In admitting so quickly that its armed forces had shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane shortly after it took off from Tehran airport last week, Iran showed commendable honesty.
However, the reality was that the regime was trying to minimise the serious global fallout from the incident. Yet, even in doing so, it could not resist trying to sow more confusion.
In the official statement acknowledging the tragic “human error”, Tehran claimed the Boeing 737 had turned around and that, therefore, the anti-aircraft missile unit on the ground had mistakenly identified it as a cruise missile.
The Ukrainians have vehemently denied that and showed international media a radar track of the doomed plane’s flight path – which shows no turn was made.
The Iranians also tried to lay the blame for the tension among its trigger-happy troops on US President Donald Trump, who ratcheted up this with last week’s assassination of top Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani.
That killing provoked a retaliation by Iran, which fired rockets at American bases in Iraq.
Trump must certainly bear part of the blame for playing with matches around a powder keg.
Now that the warmongering has cost almost 180 innocent lives, we hope calm heads prevail and words take the place of bombs.
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