Tag Archives: 176 dead

‘Clerics get lost!’: Iran protests rage on over plane disaster

By Babak Dehghanpisheh

DUBAI (Reuters) – Protesters denouncing Iran’s clerical rulers took to the streets and riot police deployed to face them on Monday, in a third day of demonstrations after authorities acknowledged shooting down a passenger plane by accident.

Demonstrations, some apparently met by a violent crackdown, are the latest twist in one of the most serious escalations between the United States and Iran since the 1979 Iranian revolution swept the U.S.-backed shah from power.

Video from inside Iran showed students on Monday chanting slogans including “Clerics get lost!” outside universities in the city of Isfahan and in Tehran, where riot police were filmed taking out positions on the streets.

Images from the previous two days of protests showed wounded people being carried and pools of blood on the ground. Gunshots could be heard, although the police denied opening fire.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who raised the stakes last week by ordering the killing in a drone strike of Iran’s most powerful military commander, tweeted to Iran’s leaders: “don’t kill your protesters.”

Tehran has acknowledged shooting down the Ukrainian jetliner by mistake on Wednesday, killing all 176 aboard, hours after it had fired at U.S. targets in Iraq to retaliate for the killing on Jan. 3 of General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad.

Iranian public anger, rumbling for days as Iran repeatedly denied it was to blame for the plane crash, erupted into protests on Saturday when the military admitted its role.

Scores, possibly hundreds, of protesters were videoed at sites in Tehran and Isfahan, a major city south of the capital.

“They killed our elites and replaced them with clerics,” they chanted outside a Tehran university, referring to Iranian students returning to studies in Canada who were on the plane.

‘DON’T BEAT THEM’

Videos posted late on Sunday recorded the gunfire around protests in Tehran’s Azadi Square. Wounded were being carried and security personnel ran gripping rifles. Riot police hit protesters with batons as people shouted “Don’t beat them!”

“Death to the dictator,” other footage showed protesters shouting, directing their fury directly at Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader since 1989.

Reuters could not authenticate the footage. State-affiliated media has reported protests in Tehran and other cities but has provided few details.

“At protests, police absolutely did not shoot because the capital’s police officers have been given orders to show restraint,” Tehran police chief Hossein Rahimi said in a statement on state media.

Tehran’s showdown with Washington has come at a precarious time for the authorities in Iran and the proxy forces they support to wield influence across the Middle East. Sanctions imposed by Trump have hammered the Iranian economy.

Iran’s authorities killed hundreds of protesters in November in what appears to have been the bloodiest crackdown on anti-government unrest since 1979. In Iraq and Lebanon, governments supported by Iran-backed armed groups have faced mass protests.

Adding to international pressure on Tehran, five nations, including Canada, Britain and Ukraine, whose citizens died when the Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737 crashed, meet in London on Thursday to discuss possible legal action, Ukraine’s foreign minister told Reuters.

In his latest tweet directed at Iran, Trump wrote on Sunday that “I couldn’t care less if they negotiate. Will be totally up to them but, no nuclear weapons and ‘don’t kill your protesters’.”

ESCALATION

Iran’s government spokesman dismissed Trump’s comments, saying Iranians were suffering because of his actions and they would remember he had ordered the killing of Soleimani.

Trump had precipitated the escalation with Iran since 2018 by pulling out of a deal between Tehran and world powers under which sanctions were eased in return for Iran curbing its nuclear program. Trump says he wants a more stringent pact.

Iran has repeatedly said it will not negotiate as long as U.S. sanctions are in place. It denies seeking nuclear arms.

The recent flare-up began in December when rockets fired at U.S. bases in Iraq killed a U.S. contractor. Washington blamed pro-Iran militia and launched air strikes that killed at least 25 fighters. After the militia surrounded the U.S. embassy in Baghdad for two days, Trump ordered the strike on Soleimani.

Iran retaliated on Wednesday by firing missiles at Iraqi bases where U.S. troops were stationed, but did not kill any Americans. The Ukrainian plane, on its way to Kiev, crashed shortly after. Most of those killed were Iranians or Iranian dual nationals. Scores were Canadians, many dual nationals who had traveled to Iran to visit relatives.

After days of denying responsibility, commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards issued profuse apologies. Iran’s president called it a “disastrous mistake”. A top commander said he had told the authorities on the day of the crash it had been shot down, raising questions about why Iran had initially denied it.

(Reporting by Babak Dehghanpisheh and Parisa Hafezi; Writing by Edmund Blair; Editing by Peter Graff, William Maclean)

Canadians light candles to mourn victims of Iran plane crash

Canadians light candles to mourn victims of Iran plane crash
By Moira Warburton and Rod Nickel

TORONTO/EDMONTON, Alberta (Reuters) – Canadians held candlelight vigils in several cities on Thursday to remember 63 citizens killed in a plane crash in Iran, in what Canada’s prime minister called a “tragedy that shocked the world.”

Canada has been in mourning since Wednesday’s crash of the Ukraine International Airlines flight bound for Kiev from Tehran that killed all 176 people aboard. It was the largest loss of life among Canadians since an Air India flight blew up in 1985 over the Atlantic Ocean, killing 268 people from Canada.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, citing intelligence sources, said on Thursday the Ukraine airlines plane was likely brought down by an Iranian missile. He added the airliner’s destruction “may well have been unintentional.” Iran denied reports the plane was hit by a missile.

The crash occurred hours after Iran fired ballistic missiles at two military bases in Iraq hosting U.S. troops, and when Iranians were on high alert for a U.S. military response.

“What happened yesterday was a tragedy, a tragedy that shocked not only Canada, but the world,” Trudeau told a news conference. He has said 138 people on the plane were connecting to a flight to Canada.

The flight was a popular transit route for Canadians traveling to Iran, in the absence of direct flights, and carried many students and academics heading home from the holidays.

In Toronto, where a crowd of more than 100 attended a vigil, some two dozen people with connections to Canada’s largest city died in the crash. They included a young couple and their toddler daughter, along with teachers and students.

“It was unbelievable to me at first,” said Vahid Golshaeian, 41, a construction contractor attending the vigil. “Almost all of us had a friend or knew somebody. Innocent people.”

People ranging in age from children to the elderly lit candles and shared figs stuffed with walnuts.

On Parliament Hill in Ottawa, mourners arranged candles on the ground in the shape of a heart. Braving chilly weather, they set photos of loved ones in front of the site’s Centennial Flame monument.

Mourners also gathered in Montreal, the home of two newlyweds who were among those from Quebec killed in the crash.

In the western Canadian city of Edmonton, a memorial was planned for Sunday in a sports facility. Thirty people from the Alberta capital died, accounting for nearly half of Canada’s death toll.

The University of Alberta alone lost 10 people with connections to the institution. Grief counselors visited the campus on Thursday and mourners left flowers at the office door of a professor who died.

Two married professors, two students and a recent graduate – all from the university’s engineering department – died in the crash.

“We are very tight-knit and everyone has been very affected by this,” said Steven Heipel, an assistant dean of engineering.

(Reporting by Moira Warburton in Toronto and Rod Nickel in Edmonton, Alberta; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Iran to download plane black box after missile blamed for crash

By Alexander Cornwell and Parisa Hafezi

DUBAI (Reuters) – Iran said on Friday it wanted to download black box recordings itself from a Ukrainian airliner that crashed, killing all 176 people aboard, after Canada and others said the plane was brought down by an Iranian missile, probably by mistake.

Iran, which has denied the Boeing 737-800 was downed by a missile, said it could take one or two months to extract information from the voice and flight data recorders. It said it could ask Russia, Canada, France or Ukraine if it needed help.

Tehran also said the probe might take one or two years.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he could not rule out a missile strike but this had not been confirmed. Kiev has said its investigators wanted to search the crash site for any debris of a Russian-made missile used by Iran.

The Ukraine International Airlines flight to Kiev from Tehran crashed on Wednesday, when Iran was on alert for a U.S. military response hours after firing missiles at U.S. targets in Iraq. https://tmsnrt.rs/39MLwwx

The incident adds to international pressure on Iran, after months of tension with the United States and tit-for-tat military strikes. Washington killed an Iranian general last week in a drone attack in Iraq, prompting Tehran’s missile launches.

On social media, many Iranians expressed anger that the plane was allowed to take off and voiced worries as images, which could not be independently verified, circulated on Twitter suggesting the crash site had been cleared by bulldozers.

Iran’s ambassador to Britain denied that debris had been bulldozed from the crash site.

“We prefer to download the black boxes in Iran. But if we see that we can’t do that because the boxes are damaged, then we will seek help,” Ali Abedzadeh, head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation, told a news conference in Tehran.

State television earlier showed the battered black boxes, saying their information could be downloaded and analyzed.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, citing intelligence from Canada and other sources, has blamed an Iranian missile for bringing down the plane that had 63 Canadians on board, although he said it “may well have been unintentional”.

“The evidence indicates that the plane was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile,” he said.

Ukraine’s general prosecutor asked Canada “to provide information available to the Canadian side that may facilitate criminal investigations” into the crash.

Russia’s deputy foreign minister said Moscow saw no grounds to blame Iran for the crash, TASS news agency reported.

ERROR

France’s BEA air accident agency said it would be involved in the investigation. BEA helped analyze data from the flight recorder of a Boeing that crashed in Ethiopia last year.

A U.S. official, citing satellite data, said Washington had concluded with a high degree of certainty that anti-aircraft missiles brought down the plane in error.

The official said the data showed the plane airborne for two minutes after departing Tehran when heat signatures of two surface-to-air missiles were detected. There was an explosion in the vicinity and heat data showed the plane on fire as it fell. U.S. military satellites detect infrared emissions from heat.

U.S. President Donald Trump said he believed “somebody could have made a mistake”.

A defense expert said the plane’s radar signature would have been similar to a U.S. military transport plane.

The New York Times said it had obtained a video appearing to show an Iranian missile hitting a plane near Tehran airport.

COOPERATION

Iran denied the airliner had been hit by a missile, saying such reports were “psychological warfare against Iran”.

“All those countries whose citizens were aboard the plane can send representatives and we urge Boeing to send its representative to join the process of investigating the black box,” government spokesman Ali Rabiei said.

U.S., Canadian and French representatives were to travel to Tehran to attend meetings for the Iranian-led crash investigation, Iranian state media reported. Washington and Ottawa do not have diplomatic relations with Tehran.

Iran’s civil aviation organization said in an initial report less than 24 hours after the incident that the three-year-old airliner, which had its last scheduled maintenance on Monday, encountered a technical problem after takeoff and was heading to a nearby airport before it crashed.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada said it was making arrangements to tour the site after an Iranian invitation.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it had designated a representative to join the probe.

Boeing said it would support the NTSB. The company is reeling from two deadly crashes of 737 MAX planes, including the one in Ethiopia, that led to the model’s grounding last year.

The crash plane was built in 2016 and is the prior generation of the 737 before the MAX.

(Reporting by Alexander Cornwell, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Parisa Hafezi in Dubai, Pavel Poliyuk in Kiev, Dominique Vidalon in Paris; Writing by Edmund Blair; Editing by Giles Elgood)

Iran mostly likely brought down Ukraine airliner with anti-aircraft missiles: U.S. officials

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A Ukraine airliner that crashed in Iran, killing all 176 people aboard, was most likely brought down accidentally by Iranian anti-aircraft missiles, U.S. officials said on Thursday.

According to satellite data, one U.S. official said, the Ukrainian International Airlines Boeing 737-800 bound for Kiev was airborne for two minutes after departing Tehran when the heat signatures of two surface-to-air missiles were detected.

That was quickly followed by an explosion in the vicinity of the plane, the official said. Heat signature data then showed the plane on fire as it went down.

Iran’s head of civil aviation was quoted by ISNA News Agency as saying that it was “impossible that a missile hit the Ukrainian plane.”

Two U.S. officials said Washington believed the downing of the plane, which occurred at a time of rising tensions between Iran and the United States, was accidental.

An Iranian report on Thursday cited witnesses on the ground and in a passing aircraft flying at a high altitude as saying the plane was on fire while in the air.

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday the deadly crash could have been a mistake and he did not believe it was a mechanical issue.

Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration declined to comment on Thursday, as did the Pentagon.

Boeing is still reeling from two deadly crashes of 737 MAX planes in five months that led to the plane’s grounding in March 2019. The 737-800 that crashed was built in 2016 and is the prior generation of the 737 before the MAX. Boeing has built about 5,000 of those planes, which has a good safety record.

(Reporting by Mark Hosenball, David Shepardson, Jonathan Landay and Phil Stewart; Writing by Tim Ahmann; Editing by Ross Colvin and Sonya Hepinstall)

No survivors after Ukrainian airliner with 176 aboard crashes in Iran

By Babak Dehghanpisheh and Matthias Williams

DUBAI/KIEV (Reuters) – A Ukrainian airliner crashed shortly after take-off from Tehran on Wednesday, bursting into flames and killing all 176 people on board.

Debris and smouldering engine parts from the Boeing 737, which carrier Ukraine International Airlines said was last serviced two days ago, were strewn across a field southwest of the Iranian capital where rescue workers in face masks laid out scores of body bags.

Among the victims were 82 Iranians, 63 Canadians, 11 Ukrainians, 10 Swedes, three Germans and three Britons, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko said. Most passengers were in transit, the airline said.

The plane crashed hours after Iran launched missiles at bases housing U.S. forces in Iraq, with the confrontation between Tehran and Washington threatening to cause a wider conflict in the Middle East. Officials cautioned that speculation about what happened was premature.

It was the Kiev-based carrier’s first fatal crash, and it said it was doing everything possible to establish the cause.

Ukraine will send a team of experts to Iran later on Wednesday to investigate the crash, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in the Ukrainian capital.

“Our priority is to establish the truth and those responsible for this terrible catastrophe,” he said.

Canadian Foreign Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said he was in touch with Ukraine’s government.

“Our hearts are with the loved ones of the victims … We will continue to keep Canadians informed as the situation evolves,” he said on Twitter.

Under international rules, responsibility for investigating the crash lies with Iran, and Iranian state television said both of the plane’s black box voice and data recorders had been found.

The semi-official Mehr news agency quoted the head of Iran’s civil aviation organization as saying it was not clear which country Iran would send the black boxes to for analysis of the data, but it would not give them to Boeing.

AMATEUR VIDEO

An amateur video, run by Iranian news agencies and purportedly of the crashing plane, showed a flash in a dark sky descending. It was accompanied by comments that the aircraft was “on fire” and then a brighter flash as it appears to hit the ground. Reuters could not authenticate the footage.

Asked at a briefing in Kiev if the plane could have been hit by a missile, Ukraine’s Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk cautioned against speculation until the results of the investigation were known.

Iran had earlier fired missiles at bases housing U.S. forces in Iraq in retaliation for a U.S. drone strike last week that killed an Iranian military commander.

Some airlines canceled Iran and Iraq flights and re-routed others away from both countries’ airspace following the missile strikes.

Safety experts say airliner accidents rarely have a single cause and that it typically takes months of investigation to understand all the factors behind them.

In Paris, the maker of the plane’s engines, French-U.S. firm CFM – co-owned by General Electric and France’s Safran – said speculation regarding the cause was premature.

Iranian TV put the crash down to unspecified technical problems, and Iranian media quoted a local aviation official as saying the pilot did not declare an emergency.

STATEMENT RESCINDED

An official at Ukraine’s embassy in Tehran said Iranian authorities had asked it to rescind an initial statement from Iran based on preliminary information that had blamed the accident on engine failure.

The plane that crashed was a three-year-old Boeing 737-800NG en route to Kiev. Its last scheduled maintenance was on Jan. 6, the airline said.

“We are in contact with our airline customer and stand by them in this difficult time. We are ready to assist in any way needed,” the manufacturer said in a statement.

The 737-800 is one of the world’s most-flown models with a good safety record and does not have the software feature implicated in crashes of the 737 MAX. Boeing grounded its 737 MAX fleet in March after two crashes that killed 346 people.

Modern aircraft are designed and certified to cope with an engine failure shortly after take-off and to fly for extended periods on one engine. But an uncontained engine failure releasing shrapnel can cause damage to other aircraft systems.

Zelenskiy said he had instructed Ukraine’s prosecutor general to open criminal proceedings, without specifying who they would involve.

Under international rules, Ukraine would be party to the investigation, and the United States would usually be accredited as the country where the jet was designed and built. France, where engine maker CFM has half its activities, may also be involved.

There was no immediate word on whether the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board would be involved. The NTSB usually invites Boeing to give technical advice in such investigations.

(Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan, Simon Cameron-Moore, Giles Elgood and Timothy Heritage)