Comment: Well, well, well. Among other things, what does this mean for Iran's official stance that no foul play was involved in downing the Ukrainian Airlines plane?...
The flight recorders from a Ukrainian plane shot down by Iran confirm illegal interference, Ukraine says.
Yevhenii Yenin's remarks came on Friday, a day after an international team examining the flight recorders from the jet had completed a preliminary analysis of the data in France.
"Grateful to all partners who helped bring this moment closer. Black boxes from #PS752 were read out and deciphered successfully. The transcript confirmed the fact of illegal interference with the plane," Yenin wrote on Twitter.
He also said Kyiv was expecting an Iranian delegation to visit Ukraine next week for talks.
Iranian forces say they downed the Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737 jet after mistaking it for a missile at a time of high tensions with the United States. All 176 people on board were killed.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said this month that it was too soon to blame human error for the shooting down of the airliner and that many questions remained unanswered.
Comment: Oddly though, Iran has long since accepted 'human error', and appears to want the matter put to bed. In fact, perhaps in anticipation of this discovery of what the black boxes would reveal, Iran's Civil Aviation Organization two weeks ago doubled down on 'human error'...
International probe
A team of investigators from the same countries as the victims of the plane crash met this week at France's Bureau for Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), in Paris, to begin extracting the data.
"The download and preliminary data analysis was an important milestone in what must be a thorough and transparent safety investigation," said Katy Fox, the chair of the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) of Canada, on Thursday.
"The work in Paris is finished, but the investigation is far from over. There are still many key questions that need to be answered," she said in a statement.
"We have urged Iran to release factual information from the recorders as soon as possible," Fox said, adding that Iran - which is leading the investigation - has not authorised the TSB to release details.
Comment: Other media outlets are spinning the Ukrainian official's comment at him saying simply that 'Iran illegally downed the plane'.
Obviously!
But that isn't what he implied. He implied that interference took place which contributed to causing Iran to down that plane. Whether, by that, he means to suggest that Iran deliberately shot it down, or that she was tricked into doing so, remains open. However, given high levels of Iranian-Ukrainian cooperation on this matter, such an accusation is unlikely.
As we speculated at the time, it appears that Iran's air defense system operator was 'tricked' into reading the UA flight as an incoming US 'retaliatory' missile, part of which may have involved altering the radar signature of the UA plane.
And yet, within days of the incident, Iran 'ate the fault'. Why?
Well, the Iranian govt was riding on its 'propaganda victory' of successfully targeting US bases in Iraq. The accidental downing of the UA flight put a dampener on that, so they apparently decided it was best to 'make the problem go away' rather than protest innocence and imply that some third party bested their air defenses.
Was Iranian Missile Operator Tricked Into Shooting Down The Ukrainian Airlines Plane Over Tehran?