Iranian officials announced on Sunday that they will not hand over the black boxes of a downed passenger jet abroad despite the international requests, State media reported.
“We are trying to read the black boxes here in Iran. Otherwise, we might send them to Ukraine or France, but we haven’t decided yet,” Hassan Rezaifar, a director in charge of accident investigation at Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization told IRNA.
A separate local report on Saturday claimed that flight data and voice recorders of the plane were being sent to Ukraine.
The Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737 crashed shortly after taking off from Tehran's Imam Khomeini airport on January 8.
Three days later and under international pressure, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani finally admitted an investigation found that “missiles fired due to human error.”
The incident occurred the same night as Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps were carrying out “revenge” attacks on American military bases in Iraq in response to the death of the regime’s top commander Qassem Soleimani a week earlier in US strikes in Baghdad.
