The Head of Iran's regulatory Central Insurance on Monday said the European companies that insured the Ukrainian plane downed by its Revolutionary Guard on January 8 must pay the compensation.
In a press conference on Monday, Gholamreza Soleimani said the plane had not been insured by Iranian companies so the compensation must be paid by the companies that insured the flight.
Foreign Ministry Spokesman Abbas Mousavi on July 31 said Iran agreed to pay compensation for the plane but added that the implementation of the payment will take time as there are technical and legal aspects that require to be resolved.
Gholamali Jahangiri, the Deputy Head of the Central Insurance, in January had said that the damages were estimated at around $100 to $150 million including $24 million for the passengers, crew and cargo and $70 million for the plane itself. Jahangiri said this would be paid after Iran and Ukraine reached an agreement.
On July 30 a delegation headed by Deputy Foreign Minister for International and Legal Affairs Mohsen Baharvand has arrived in Kiev for negotiations with Ukrainian authorities.
Baharvand commented that the amount of the compensation had not been proposed by any of the parties yet and would be determined on the basis of international laws regarding such incidents.
Iranian authorities have always claimed that the downing of the plane was "unintentional" and attributed it to "human error". Ukraine, however, has strongly objected to accepting "human error" as the real cause of the incident and demanded an impartial and independent criminal investigation to bring the guilty to justice.
The aircraft was shot down hours after Iran fired missiles at Iraqi airbases housing U.S. forces in retaliation for the U.S. drone killing of a senior Iranian commander. All 176 onboard including 57 Canadians were killed in the crash.
"Given the circumstance of what happened, there are all reasons to ask from Iran to pay the highest price for what it did," the Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on July 28 at a news conference during a visit to Warsaw.
"I cannot disclose final numbers of the compensation...numbers will be the result of the consultations," he said.
