Iran blames ‘misaligned radar’ for shooting down of Ukrainian jet that killed 176

Flight 752, a Ukraine International Airlines aircraft, was struck by two missiles and crashed soon after taking off from Tehran’s main airport on January 8

Tehran’s air defences had been on high alert at the time in case the US retaliated against strikes hours earlier on American troops stationed in Iraq

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Mourners light candles for the victims of Ukrainian Airlines flight 752 during a vigil at Mel Lastman Square in Toronto, Canada, in January – 55 Canadian citizens were among the dead. Photo: AFP

Published: 6:33pm, 12 Jul 2020Updated: 8:25pm, 12 Jul 2020

Iran said that the misalignment of an air defence unit’s radar system was the key “human error” that led to the accidental downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane in January.

“A failure occurred due to a human error in following the procedure” for aligning the radar, causing a ‘107-degree error’ in the system, the Iranian Civil Aviation Organisation (CAO) said in a report late Saturday.

This error “initiated a hazard chain” that saw further errors committed in the minutes before the plane was shot down, said the CAO document, presented as a “factual report” and not as the final report on the accident investigation.

Flight 752, a Ukraine International Airlines aircraft, was struck by two missiles and crashed soon after taking off from Tehran’s main airport on January 8, at a time of heightened US-Iran tensions.

Rescuers search the wreckage of the Ukrainian plane in Shahedshahr, southwest of Tehran, in January. Photo: AP

The Islamic republic admitted several days later that its forces accidentally shot down the Kiev-bound plane, killing all 176 people on board. Most the passengers on the Boeing 737 were Iranians, with Canadians, Ukrainians, Afghans, Britons and Swedes also aboard.

The CAO said that, despite the erroneous information available to the radar system operator on the aircraft’s trajectory, he could have identified his target as an airliner, but instead there was a “wrong identification”.