TEHRAN - A court in Tehran convicted as many as 10 Iranian military personnel on Sunday for their involvement in the shooting down of Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752 in 2020, according to Iran’s semi-official Mehr News. But the sentence was dismissed as a “sham ruling” by victims’ families who say Iranian authorities have failed to prosecute those ultimately responsible for the disaster. The main defendant in the trial was the unnamed commander of the Tor M1 surface-to-air missile defense system that shot down the plane, killing all 176 people on board.
The commander was sentenced to 13 years in prison, according to Mehr. The Boeing 737 flight departed from Imam Khomeini Airport in Tehran on January 8, 2020, and was headed to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv when it was hit by anti-aircraft missiles shortly after takeoff. Days after the downing, Iranian authorities admitted that its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force shot the plane down by mistake after it was misidentified as a cruise missile by an air defense operator. In the Tehran court’s final verdict on Sunday, it said the passenger plane was shot down by “human error.” The commander fired missiles at the civilian aircraft twice, “contrary to the order of the command post and other instructions,” the court said, according to Mehr.
The other defendants found guilty were personnel of the air defense post, Mehr reported. The Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims, an international group seeking justice for those killed, released a statement on Sunday saying the victims’ families “never recognized the Islamic Regime’s court as a legitimate tribunal.” It claimed the tribunal had failed to prosecute the “main perpetrators” of the incident, instead prosecuting “ten low-ranking officers with total obscurity of their backgrounds and identities.” The association condemned the trial as a “sham ruling,” after court sessions were held in private.