Ukrainian plane hit by two short-range missiles: Iran

Tehran, Jan 21 (SocialNews.XYZ) Iran's Civil Aviation Organization has said that the Ukrainian passenger plane that crashed shortly after take off from Tehran on January 8, was hit by two short-range TOR-M1 missiles, it was reported on Tuesday.

"Two TOR-M1 missiles were launched from the northern side at this plane," the state media said in a report citing the latest report by the Organization.

"The way how the missiles caused the incident and the analysis of this measure is under study," Xinhua news agency quoted the report as saying.

With 167 passengers and nine crewmembers on board, the Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 crashed outside Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport on January 8, shortly after take off

Three days later, Iran's armed forces confirmed that the airliner was shot down "unintentionally" by the military, as the plane "was mistaken for a hostile target" near a "sensitive military site of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC)".

Tuesday's development comes after Hassan Rezaifar, the Director General of the Civil Aviation Organization, said on Sunday that the crashed airliner's black boxes were still in Iran.

"We are trying to examine the black box of the crashed Ukrainian plane in Iran and our next options will be Ukraine and France," Press TV quoted Rezaifar as saying on Sunday.

"But no decision has been made so far to send the box to a second country," he added.

The crash came on the same day Iranian missiles attacked two military bases in Iraq that housed US troopers, which came as a retaliation to the January 3 killing of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani by an American drone in Baghdad.

Source: IANS