Iran said it will soon send to France the black boxes it retrieved from the crash site of a Ukraine International Airlines plane outside the capital city of Tehran back in January. The passenger aircraft was hit by a missile defense base belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) at the dawn of a tense night between the United States and Iran. The latter had struck a key American military base in Iraq with a barrage of missiles in retaliation for the US killing of IRGC’s Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in the Iraqi capital.
Of the 176 people on board the plane — most of them Iranian-Canadians — none survived the strike. Marking a U-turn from their initial denial, Iranian authorities came out three days after the incident to officially admit that the crash was the fruit of “a disastrous mistake” by missile battery operators. They promised a transparent probe and justice for the victims.
