Families Of Victims Of Ukrainian Plane Crash Urge Those With Evidence To Come Forth

The Association of the Families of the Victims of Flight P752 issued a video message on Friday urging anyone who has information or evidence about the downing of the plane to come forward.

In a video message published on social media, Alireza Ghandchi, who lost his wife and two children in the crash, said that victims' families want to know what happened in the 3 minutes and 42 seconds between when the Revolutionary Guard fired the first of its two missiles and the crash.

"Tell us what you know about this crime," Mr. Ghandchi addressed the public.

Ukraine's flight P752 was shot down by two missiles in the early morning hours of January 8, 2020 near Tehran's International Khomeini Airport, killing all 176 passengers and crew members onboard.

Last Sunday, Touraj Dehghani-Zanganeh, the head of Iran's Civil Aviation Organization, announced several takeaways from the analysis of the data and cockpit talk from the plane.

According to Dehghani-Zanganeh, analysis of the data retrieved from the Ukrainian jet's flight recorders showed that the passengers and crew were not harmed for at least 19 seconds before the second missile hit the plane.

According to Dehghani-Zanganeh, during those critical seconds, the passengers remained alive and the cabin crew who realized the "unnormal situation" tried to navigate the plane, despite the serious damage caused by the missile.

Dehghani-Zanganeh’s announcement added to the emotional ordeal of the families of the victims, who have been asking on social media why a second missile was fired at the plane, 25 seconds after the first, if it was fired by the operator "mistaking the plane for a cruise missile.”

Iran at first denied any involvement in the crash, but after three days, when overwhelming evidence emerged showing the plane had been shot down, the Revolutionary Guard claimed it was "an accident due to human error" and that the operator of the missile had fired without orders from his superiors.

For more than six months, Iranian authorities refused to hand over the flight recordings to other countries that could decode the contents, before finally surrendering the recordings and sending to France for decoding and analysis.