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Iran makes arrests in plane crash probe amid public fury

Iran's judiciary says arrests have been made in connection with the crash of a Ukrainian plane last week that Tehran blamed on a "human error" by its armed forces.
Rescue teams are seen on January 8, 2020 at the scene of a Ukrainian airliner that crashed shortly after take-off near Imam Khomeini airport in the Iranian capital Tehran. - Search-and-rescue teams were combing through the smoking wreckage of the Boeing 737 flight from Tehran to Kiev but officials said there was no hope of finding anyone alive. The vast majority of the passengers on the Ukraine International Airlines flight were non-Ukrainians, including 82 Iranians and 63 Canadians, officials said. (Photo

At a weekly press briefing in Tehran Jan. 14, the spokesman for Iran's judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Esmaeili, announced "several" arrests were made in connection with the crash of a Ukrainian passenger jet last Wednesday. All 176 people on board were killed.

It took Iranian authorities three days to admit that a missile battery operator "mistakenly" shot down the aircraft. At the time, the country's armed forces were in a state of high alert in anticipation of a US attack in response to a barrage of Iranian missiles on two American bases in neighboring Iraq.

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