Deputy FM: Iran will compensate Ukrainian plane victims on basis of int’l documents

Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for International and Legal Affairs Mohsen Baharvand reacted to reports that Ukraine would insist on the maximum sum of compensation for the relatives of the jetliner crash victims.

He said Iran would definitely pay compensation because of the mistaken downing of the plane, but “the criteria for the payment must be defined.”

“We have told the Ukrainian colleagues that our criterion is international documents, and organizations of which we are a member, and to which we are committed,” he underlined.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in February that Ukraine was not satisfied with the size of compensation Iran had offered to families of Ukrainians killed in the incident and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said last Thursday that Ukraine would make every effort to maximize compensations.

Next round of talks

Elsewhere in his remarks, Baharvand noted that the next round of talks between Iran and Ukraine on compensation will be held in the first half of October in Tehran.

The first round of the talks was held in Ukraine’s capital last Thursday.  

The Ukrainian foreign minister said on Friday that the first round of talks were constructive.

Kuleba said the sides also agreed on the terms of the next round of talks.

On January 8, Iran mistakenly shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 shortly after take-off from Tehran’s main airport. All 176 aboard were killed. The majority of the victims were Iranian or Canadian, and many were dual nationals.

Iran later called it a “disastrous mistake” that happened at a time when air defense forces were on high alert in case the US retaliated against Iranian missile strikes hours earlier on American military bases stationed in Iraq.

Those strikes were carried out in response to the assassination of Iranian Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, in a US drone strike near Baghdad airport on Jan. 3.

An international team completed the data extraction from the recovered black boxes of the plane in France’s Bureau for Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) in Paris on July 23.

An Iranian delegation leading the international team announced on July 24 that the BEA’s measures were in full compliance with standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

The data included details from the cockpit voice recorder, which records conversations between the pilots and noises on the plane, as well as the flight data recorder, which tracks the flight parameters.

The data was handed over to the Iranian investigation bureau.

IRNA and Tasnim News Agency contributed to this story.